How do they make money - Jeremy Zawodny

Jeremy Zawodny, one of the highest profile of the bloggers, moved into the platform engineering (infrastructure) group at Yahoo in 2003 to do MySQL support, architecture, planning. As he put it himself "Jeremy Zawodny plays with MySQL by day and spends his spare time flying gliders in California."

His entertaining daily blog chronicles his work at Yahoo, plus random personal thoughts about the web, the weather and the hereafter.

Actually it's not quite right to say that he talks about his work at Yahoo, more his work outside Yahoo and his, shall we say, "evangelising" for Yahoo

His bio, used to promote the upcoming WMW conference in New Orleans, where he is a speaker concentrates solely on the tech side of his work

Jeremy has been with Yahoo! for almost five years. His Yahoo! career started with the high-traffic Yahoo! Finance site, where he worked to make MySQL part of the site's core infrastructure in large batch operations, as well as real-time feed processing and serving content directly on the site. He has since worked on numerous other groups including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Personals, Yahoo! Sports, and Yahoo! Shopping. Jeremy is currently Yahoo!'s MySQL guru, working closely with Yahoo!'s many engineering groups on application architecture design, database support, tuning and troubleshooting.

What Jeremy seems to do is give Yahoo a rather personal feel, but it appears as "mild" PR none the less

"PR does not own the blog. And it'd be a wasted opportunity if it was just another PR outlet," he wrote. "I've tried to impress upon the folks involved that running a weblog is about openness and that it's a two-way street. Bloggers can often smell PR influence a mile away."

Zawodny added he expected readers would be a mix of "journalists, bloggers, power users, and random other folks." Zawodny debates the issues himself in Honest and Blogvangelism

It'll be harder than it used to be, because I'm more likely to actually know the people that I run the risk of offending. And that means toning down would be the easy thing to do. But would you be nearly as interested if I always did the easy thing?

And he signs off with the words of Mark Pilgrim on corporate blogging:

A corporate blog is just like a personal blog, except you don’t get to use the word “motherfucker.”

This is a personal blog. I just happen to talk about work stuff more than is probably healthy.

And he wrote himself in 2003

If you wanted to gather some statistics about the usage and growth of blogging and aggregators, where would you get 'em? I'm talking about the kind of numbers that make a slightly pointy haired boss think twice about ignoring the blog world.

If he ever found out the answer to his own question, he certainly isn't letting me find it. Like Russell Beattie, Jeremy Zawodny is a "semi corporate" blogger, though both would probably deny the term. No advertising on their blogs, and no way of getting at site stats. Obviously independence has a price.