Eric Eldon, Who is he?

You may be wondering, who is Eric
Eldon? How did he make it on such a famed blog as this?

I asked myself this same question earlier this week. Lucky me, as it turned out he was the Keynote speaker in my reporting class.

Since the spring of 2007 Eric has become a key player in the world of technology blogging. Along with blog/website founder Matt Marshall, Eric spends over 80 hours a week ensuring that his readers appetite for the latest, most nifty tech information is satiated.

Eric focus's most of his work on social websites (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace). Unveiling the latest gossip and innovations as soon as they come out. But don't think this is some glorified PR job. Eric works diligently to stick by the standards of journalism, having learned the importance of the fourth estate when writing for Stanford's daily newspaper.

"That's the role of Democracy, keeping eachother accountable," said Eric.

Eric emphasized the huge opportunities local news publications have to move to a blogging style of website. As he has seen this firsthand from venturebeat.com. He further states that with an apt team of writers, each covering a different beat, a local blog could take over that news market.

While venturebeat.com has become quite successful, Eric has also become quite knowledgeable on beat blogging. As this was not his initial business of choice, he gave two examples of accidental hirings to venturebeat.com, one of them being himself.

"He [venturebeat.com's blogger MG Siegler] just linked his blog to mine so I started reading it," said Eric. "It was really intelligent and well written... so we hired him."

In the end, Eric's most important piece of advice for aspiring journalists is to just blog: Write as much as you can, update all the time, respond to comments and "milk the interests of your audience for all it's worth."