You may have noticed me capturing geeks, technophiles in a significant %age against other niche. But before you apply your judgment, let me tell you it’s not purposeful. The presence of elitebloggers here is governed by their hard-earned popularity of blogs, technorati ranking and above all the choice of elitebloggers themselves. And today we have with us William Barnes, founder, GearCrave who is geared up to carve a new level of success for his blog along with its editor Mike Payne. Lately, I happened to reach William and got the chance to scan the success secrets and future plans about his Mens Buying and Lifestyle Guide.

Here you go:

William, introduce yourself to my readers and take us through your daily flow at work.

My name is William Barnes; I am 28 years old and was born in London. I read Mechanical Engineering at University and now live in Santa Monica Los Angeles. My daily work flow normally involves trying to balance the overload of emails I get and getting to the tasks I have in TO-DO-LIST.

GearCrave doesn’t have any tagline. If asked to produce one, what would that be?

The Mens Buying and Lifestyle Guide.

Time Magazine handpicked iPhone as the invention of the year 2007. What according to you are the prospective candidates for 2008 award in the same category?

Hopefully something like the Tesla the more exposure that gets the better.

With the evolution of green houses and hybrid cars, do you think is technology really becoming green or is it a steep PR exercise?

Some are some aren’t, as with all innovation the price premium it carries is eroded over time. Hopefully mainstream acceptance is possible; VC money certainly seems to think so.

Tell us about WPBGroup. Are you the editor for all the four-sites falling under this group?

Not at all, I have trouble writing the address on a letter, Mike Payne edits GearCrave, Myke Armstrong runs Nerdyshirts and Mali Elfman is the editor for LA.CityZine. There are all-great at what they do and I am very lucky to work with them.

Japan seems to breed robots in huge numbers. Can you imagine a day when robots are efficient enough to substitute humans for all major tasks? Would you depute one to blog for you?

I can imagine a day when robots dream of electric sheep.

What do you count as one factor that attracts readers to your blog besides gamut of gadget-related blogs?

GearCrave; Mike strikes a great balance between finding really cool products every day with, insane editorials, like the GearCrave guide to buying your own missile silo, you combine that with the amazing competitions we run and I am not surprised people come back.

Nerdyshirts: Myke is always releasing sweet t-shirts, they always seem to be conversation pieces. My favorite shirt is “Too Many muth’ uckers“ I am a big Flight of the Conchords fan and every bar I go to people talk to me about the shirt.

LA.CityZine: Mali and her enormous team of writers are constantly finding the cool and quirky of LA, the amount of music and movie coverage on that site is amazing.

What are your other interests besides your work?

Football as in with your feet.

Tell us about your ‘must-read’ or favorites blogs?

Calacanis, Techcrunch, NerdyShirts, Afrojacks, HolyTaco, FluidApp, Twit.tv, Thebachelorguy, todolist.

Provide us with your five favorite posts you have written to date.

How to buy your own missile silo

Family tree T-Shirt

How to buy your own private island

Thalbach wooden USB drives

Flight of the conchords T-Shirts

You’re marooned on a desert island: What gadget you wish to have?

A teleporter?

How would you like to be known as?

Entrepreneur

Quick bites:

Hours you invest digging net: Too many

Biggest blogging mistake you did: I don’t blog

One hidden truth: Not telling

Advice you would have given yourself five years ago? Here is the internet, get on with it.

If not a blogger, then Someone like J.Calacanis or Mark Cuban

Life without Internet: Probably work either in a IT start up in London or in the movie business in LA.

First gadget you kept your fingers upon: Tabletop Donkey Kong

One thing you hate about GearCrave: I don’t hate anything about it, I have ambitions for it that are not fulfilled and we are working towards making them happen.

If asked for giving three tips to a greenhorn blogger, what would that be?

Don’t ask me, email Peter Rojas, Ryan Block or Brian Lam, those guys seem to have it down.

What new features can your savvy readers expect in coming months from GearCrave?

Big changes, by Xmas GearCrave won’t be alone, it would have changed significantly.

Besides content generation, networking comes as a part and parcel of a blogging. What are you doing at this front to maintain the popularity of your blog?

Not as much as I should, two years ago I knew nothing about the commercial side of the internet, much less about web publishing, it has been a great learning curve. The downside though of not having worked in the industry and I am very short on contacts so over the next 12 months I am going to make a concerted effort to attend more conferences and events like the techcrunch meet ups etc.

Beyond the human side GearCrave has a lot of the social networking options covered: we have a page summarizing all the ways you can follow gearcrave at.

Do you think blogs are or can be as popular as NYTimes, Time, NewsWeek are?

They already are and in some cases more so.

Where do you see the future of Blogosphere?

Consolidation of commercial blogs and the development of tools to process the second tier of sites.

Whom would you recommend as my next EliteBlogger and Why?

Definitely Cory Jones at HolyTaco, Mike at AfroJacks, or Eric at TheBachelorguy. I don’t know if they have the time, but I always love reading what they write.

Give us your views on EliteChoice.

I like the redesign, I am not sure the interview with bloggers necessarily matches the consumer female demographic that your ads are aimed at, but then I am guessing they are good for link building.

You can ask me one question.

Why do cats hate me?

Possibly, you may have lately developed a soft corner for dogs as well-:)

Here i thank William for giving us an insight about his blog and wish him luck for its upcoming features.

Ask any blogger running an established blog the number of posts he features during a day, supporting hands behind it, editors on job and you may not be wrong anticipating an overt two-digit response. But there is always an exception, which in this case is well exemplified by WebUrbanist. One post a day, five authors, one lead editor is the master plan behind the success of WebUrbanist.

Kurt Kohlstedt, Founder & Lead Editor, WebUrbanist stands firm on their policy of featuring one-article-per-day, identifying the want of quality over quantity. Besides this jumbo post, Kurt keeps himself engaged working on spinoffs and ways to tie together various articles and plugging in more valuable features following the rule of thumb: “Interesting, extreme, random, funny, obscure and otherwise sensational content.”

After a long oration, I propose you to read further to know more about Kurt and his Urbanist Den.

Introduce yourself to my readers and take us through your urban flow of day at work.
My name is Kurt Kohlstedt and I am the primary founder and leader editor of WebUrbanist, a weird and (hopefully) wonderful weblog about everything urban (culture, design, architecture art, travel and more) “ and some things that aren”t.

I used to be the primary author for the site but as it has grown we have brought a number of new writers on board and with them a healthy diversity of styles and subjects. I usually start my day as most people probably do: by checking my email. Back when it used to crash regularly, however, my first task was always to make sure the site wasn”t down.

Read the full story »

Another interesting blog and the multi-talented face behind it aptly fit well onto my Eliteblogger series. The tagline of his blog reads I think I think, therefore, I think I think I am, I think, making us think for a while if it is an extension of Desecrates philosophy but on inquiry David Szondy, founder, DavidSzondyEphemeral discloses that it can be seen as his take on the thought that there’s some thinking going on here, about which he no idea. He says: I’m of the opinion that I probably exist “or, at least, I think I might, but I’m not going to commit myself.

Szondy is a Washington-based freelance writer and webmaster for davidszondy.com, home of Tales of Future Past. In the past, David was engaged with chief corporations i.e. Boeing and Microsoft and is also the author of numerous plays; the most lately produced being an adaptation of Kenneth Grahame’s The Reluctant Dragon in Seattle and is a retired archaeologist.

Delve into the straight responses coming from David’s end:

Introduce yourself to my readers and take us to your typical day at work.
Hello, I’m David Szondy, the founder and webmaster of the blog Ephemeral Isle and its sister site, Tales of Future Past. I am a former archaeologist and university lecturer based outside of Seattle, WA where I now make a living as a freelance writer/editor.

Like most writers, I’m afraid that my work is less interesting to hear about than to read the final products of, as it generally involves many hours of scribbling, staring into space, glowering at a screen and coming up with an excuse to make another pot of tea. My work days tend to veer wildly between the structured and chaotic. When I have a client that needs me to travel, I can be anywhere and doing most anything.

When I work from my home office, my routine is basically to start the day by taking care of my email, scanning the news feeds and alerts for anything that might be of interest for Ephemeral Isle, and sorting out any future projects that are on the horizon. If it’s a a good news day full of interesting items I usually have the blog done inside of two hours. Otherwise, I put my notes aside to work on later while I concentrate on other writing projects and making sure that my two incredibly insecure dogs get enough attention.

Your blog davidszondy.com is known to be the home of Tales of Future Past. Can you elaborate Future Past for us? What is the focus of your blog?

Future Past is my word for how we used to look at the future. Other people have called this retro future or paleo-future, but I’m a bit more specific in my definition. Future Past is that era (give or take a decade) between about 1908, when Hugo Gernsback publish Modern Electrics, the first popular technology magazine, and 1964, when the New York World’s Fair took place and the Space Age was at it’s height. This was a time when people were making predictions about the future (They did is before and we still do that today), but very predictions that, taken as a whole, were very consistent and foresaw the 21st century as one of a very small number of alternatives “usually ones that involved flying cars, jet packs, food pills and robots as props.

It’s a fascinating field because so many of these predictions were treated as virtual blueprints for a future world where an article on, for example, a new kind of airplane wing would be accompanied by a detailed drawing of a giant aircraft using that wing that pointed out where the staterooms and loading ramps would be. Or, as in the case of the ‘64 World’s Fair, you had mock up displays of future technologies that looked as if the designers were just waiting for someone to come along and deal with the tiresome detail of making that thing actually work. You don’t get that sort of confidence these days.

Tell us about your experience while writing numerous plays? Do you count yourself as a born author or you have developed this skill during the course of time?
Playwriting is one of the most rewarding and frustrating types of writing. A play allows a writer a lot of scope to express ideas yet, because it’s so much a spoken medium, it forces the writer to really learn how to handle dialogue and pacing. I’ve been very fortunate in my playwriting to not only see my works produced and even win the odd award, but also to collaborate with some very talented people, such as my wife Lela Szondy, with whom I co-adapted The Reluctant Dragon for the stage and Amy Walton, who worked with me on the award-winning Circling the Drain before heading off to Hollywood to pursue a film acting career. It’s also a very heartbreaking job because plays take an incredible amount of work, often over years of writing and rewriting, and with the hard times that live theatre has gone through in recent years one has to stand by and see a lot of hard work by a lot of good people go by the way when a project is abandoned.

You seem to have a deep relation with pen. When did you sense an inclination towards writing?

I got into writing at a very young age when my boyhood daydreams started getting more elaborate and episodic until I was putting together actual stories. Then I noticed that I was getting irritated by a lot of things I read or saw on television and came to the conclusion that the rubbish I came up with was better than their rubbish and I started putting it down on paper. Fortunately, very little of this juvenilia got into print, so we’re all pretty lucky.

Which all projects you are working upon currently?
I’m still working on Tales of Future Past, which has many more pages still to be added and I’m hoping to adapt into one or a series of books in the near future. I’m also have a couple of other plays in the works, one of which is a comedy about the Normandy Invasion, there’s a panto, an adaption of E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, an independent documentary project on science fiction and technology, and I’m involved in a couple of projects in Hollywood and London that are still in the planning stages.

Your blog Ephemeral Isle seems to be driven by your thinking and imagination. What remains the nature of posts/writings that reside here?
The format of Ephemeral Isle is pretty much my reaction to modern life; specifically, those news items, gadgets, bits of popular culture or even things that happen to me that cause me to go bloody hell! or words to that effect. Having said that, the key to a successful blog is consistency, so I then take items that catch my attention and sort them out until those that remain fit into the major themes of the EI, such as the erosion of civil liberties in Britain, remarkable new scientific or technological advances, cool new gadgets, the threat of Islamic extremism, the absurdity of modern life, and how progress often deserves to be met with a goggle-eyed stare rather than unqualified applause.

How different is its tagline I think I think, therefore, I think I think I am, I think from what Descartes said: I THINK, THEREFORE I AM’?
Descartes was way too cocky when he said that and I hope someone told him so. My take on it is that there’s some thinking going on here, on whose part I’ve no idea, so I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I’m of the opinion that I probably exist “or, at least, I think I might, but I’m not going to commit myself.

Ephemeral literally means short-lived. What made you add a suffix called Ephemeral?
I got the name from James Lileks, who has or had a section of his remarkable website called Flotsam Cove, which he used to toss out ideas that he hadn’t determined were worth keeping. At the same time, Ephemeral Isle was a phrase that had popped into my head that I thought amusing and since my blog was a place where I made my transient observations and rants about modern life, it seemed that Ephemeral Isle fit the nature of the beast quite nicely.

Tell us about your association with corporations like Boeing and Microsoft.
I’ve had them as clients on and off over the years and because they’re such huge companies the nature of projects can very greatly, but I generally find that I’m less interested working for corporations on anything put a consultant basis because they tend to get rather set in their ways.

How many radio plays have you done? How do you find your stay being engaged with radio industry? Which radio plays of yours you like the most?
How many have I done? Not as many as I’d like. Radio is probably the most exciting medium there is for a writer because every single second of a radio play has to be filled with sound and words, so you can’t get away with writing they fight or a badger falls from the balcony and hope that the director sorts it out later. You’re the one who has to make it work by putting the right words in the character’s mouths. It’s also interesting because it’s so different depending on where you are. Britain, for example, has a thriving radio industry with plenty of scope for new dramas, comedies and documentaries while in the States it’s much rarer because the market is dominated by music, sports and talk. On the other hand, the Internet has brought us the podcast, so anyone with a modest budget can set up their own Mercury Theatre On The Air if they like, which is incredible when you think about it. As to my favourite play, I’d say Phone Call of Cthulhu, which is about a collision between talk radio and H. P. Lovecraft.

How you would like to be known as?
Writer
Author
Archaeologist
Free lancer
Blogger

I think I’d like to be known best as a writer because it’s what I always wanted to do first and I feel that it encompasses all the others.

Quick bites:
Hours you invest digging net: I use the Net so much in my work that if it weren’t for my family I’d probably never leave my desk.

Biggest blogging mistake you did: Not having comments on the site from day one. Visitor feedback is absolutely vital.

One hidden truth: To be a real success at blogging you’ve go to feed the dragon every single day. That means being willing to prostitute your private life and embarrass your loved ones by resorting to personal anecdotes when you run out of material.

If asked to post only on one blog (besides DavidZondy.com), which one would that be? That’s a good question. Blogs are often such personal things that I’d feel like I was poaching if I posted on someone else’s. I’ll say eggbaconchipsandbeans because I like breakfast a lot.

Advice you would have given yourself five years ago? Listen to your wife.

If not a writer, then Threadbare and penniless. Hang on, that’s me now.

Life without Internet: Horrendous! I’d have to go back to scrounging every secondhand reference book I could lay my hands on.

Count of professions you have been into: Seven, if you count Dialect Coach.

Where do you see the future of blogging in coming five years?
Two things:
1) Its going to be much more interactive with much more high bandwidth content such as video.
2) It will be much more powerful as it cuts further into traditional journalism’s territory.

Whom would you recommend as my next EliteBloger and why?

James Lileks at lileks. He is the funniest writer in America today and his Bleat is a daily treat, though he is incredibly busy.

Give us your views on EliteChoice.
I never fail to marvel at the human ingenuity your site showcases or the sort of things people are willing to part with good money for.

Your turn! You can ask me one question.
Are people really daft enough to put treadmills at their work stations?
Yes, as long as manufacturers like to play with their wild levels of creativity and come out with such revolutionary offerings’.

We thank David for managing time for us and wish him luck with his “Tales of Future Past.”

10 years ago: The adventurous soul within you was battling with the desire to explore remote geographies’ but was subsided by the high cost of making phone calls and erratic nature of internet connectivity, only medium to keep you in touch with closed ones then. And today you find yourself occupied amidst family chaos that rethinking about that lost time with all facilities available in not in your hands.

But Luc Levesque (aka Lucky) created a different history and decided not to compromise on his desires. It was in 1997 that Luc designed a solution that could offer a conversational bridge between people sitting at remote corners of the globe. Travelpod, something that started as a dirty web site has undergone through various stages since then to evolve not only as a mere travel blog but an absolute The Web’s Original Travel Blog Community.

Having unveiled 16% of the world, Luc’s Travelpod is populated with 40-50k travel experiences on weekly basis. If figures make a difference to you then till date Luc has posted 1666 photos and 125 entries across 11 travel blogs and shares that Travelpod is a storehouse of around 3 million travel experiences. Out of my curiosity, I asked Luc about his most memorable vacation and he smilingly said: 9 month solo trip to Asia and the Middle East.

Jump further to know more about Luc and experiment with ways to reap benefits from a product like Travelpod.

Introduce yourself to my readers and take us to the usual/unusual flow of the day?
On a typical day I’ll start off spending a little quality time with my new born, Tristan (around 6am) and then check my email and RSS feeds before going to work. At the office I try to touch base with everyone on the team and to work with our developers on new features for the site. We’re always growing the team so interviews with candidates and looking for a new (bigger) office has been taking a lot of time recently.

I try to reserve time to report all of our stats, reports and make sure everything is still on track, and if it’s not, make the adjustments where we need to. We’ve got a great team so I don’t need to get too involved in the support, community work or other day to day stuff but I try to keep my hands in everything a little bit. Then it’s back home to spend more time with the family or out to spend time with the startup community at local events.

How frequently you travel? What percentage of the world is still left untouched?
I travel about once per month, it used to be for pleasure, but now, it’s mostly for business. I have traveled to I have traveled to 16% of the world, so there’s lots left to see.

How easy or difficult is it to be a blogger and a traveler at the same time? Your trait of travel Blogger is inherent or is developed?
It’s very easy to be a travel blogger, if you love writing and you love traveling, you can have a blog. The trick is creating a quality blog. Developing the craft of writing is a lifelong commitment. Our best travel bloggers take it very seriously, and the quality of their writing reflects that.

Travelpod’s inception in 1997 marked the entry of Web’s first site allowing travelers share their experiences’. What led you create such a platform and what turning points have you come across in its evolving span of 10 years?
In the early years of the Internet, I was backpacking across Europe and wanted to be able to keep in touch with all of my friends and family, in “real-time”, to let them know where I was and what I was doing. Expensive long-distance calls weren’t an option, mail was too slow, and email just didn’t cut it.

To make my life easier, I thought up, and built a quick and dirty web site that let me login, upload some stories and email the link to the site to my friends. The site was an instant hit. In fact the feedback I received was so good that when I returned, I decided to build a much more advanced and feature-rich online hosting system for my fellow travelers. With that, TravelPod was born.

Since TravelPod’s inception, the website has gone through many changes and many improvements. Our most exciting changes include an easy to use photo uploader and the development of the social network game, Traveler IQ.

Your current tagline reads The Web’s original travel blog. Considering Travelpod has taken the shape of a community, if you are asked to revise the tagline what would that be?
Adding Community to the end of the slogan wouldn’t be a bad idea now that I think about it: The Web’s Original Travel Blog Community

What is the business model of Travelpod?
We provide free blogs for travelers and try to pay the bills by showing ads in places that our members don’t mind.

Was Travelpod’s singular persona not enough that you ended up being a part of TripAdvisor or Expedia? With this acquisition can we expect any changes in terms of age-old brand and strategy followed by latter?
TravelPod will only get better, because we now have access to more members, who are creating more blogs. More information about travel destinations can only make the travel industry better.

Your site says it aloud that it features around 40-50k travel experiences from across the world. If I can ask a rough count of the total travel experiences shared here till date since its evolution?
Well over 3 million

If asked for giving three tips to a greenhorn travel blogger, what would that be?
1. Use all of your senses. The best way to describe a place is to describe it using sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. This gets your message across very effectively. Your readers can travel along on your trip with you, and they will keep coming back for more. If it’s interesting to you, it’s probably interesting to a lot of other people. So write about it, chances are, someone else will be interested in what you saw or what you did on the road.
2. Be honest: Traveling isn’t always happy and fun. Things go wrong all the time, you probably will miss a bus, or lose your luggage. There is no reason to ignore these inherent risks of traveling.
3. Think deep! It’s great to tell everyone what you did on your trip. What’s even more great, is sharing what you learned about the place that you went. How did it change you and what did you think about life in this place? It’s great to enlighten other people with your first-hand knowledge of a place. Not everyone can travel as much as you do, share your thoughts with people who don’t have that luxury.

Can my readers know: Which are those three must-carry things that you always carry on your trip?
Aside from the usual (passport, credit card, etc)
1. A pocket atlas for quizzing travel mates and passing time
2. Travel Journal for taking notes (to be added later to my blog)
3. An adventurous spirit!

Tell us about your ˜must-read’ or favorite blogs?
From TravelPod:

Whereshegoes
Technotrekker
Modernoddyseus

Others:

Vagabondish
Elliott
TripAdvisor

Provide us with your five favorite posts you have written to date.
It’s hard to pick a favorite:
Fireball farewells
When good nights go bad
Over the frontier, the road to Georgia
T-minus 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…
Touch down in Paraguay
How would you like to be known as:

1. Traveler
2. Blogger
3. Entrepreneur
4. Explorer
5. Adventurous Soul

Adventurous Soul

Quick bites:
Hours you invest digging net: 15-20 hours per week
Biggest blogging mistake you did: Waiting too long to blog about a trip “ it’s always better when it’s fresh
If asked to post only on one blog (not Travelpod), which one would that be? Vagabondish

Advice you would have given yourself five years ago? Don’t let go of your dreams, anything is possible
If not a traveler or a blogger then¦. I would probably be doing techy stuff most likely from some other country.
Life without Travel: Is empty!
Once memorable vacation: 9 month solo trip to Asia and the Middle East

How beneficial are these travel experiences for a prospective traveler thinking to visit an unknown land?
TravelPod is a great place to go to get started on your research. Once you have picked a destination, you can read through personal blogs. If someone has done something you find extremely interesting, you can contact them directly and find out even more information. It’s a lot of fun and you can make some great friends along the way.
Tell us some weird things about you that most of the people don’t know.
I have a long middle toe ¦ monks at a Sri Lankan monastery I stayed in called it my lucky toe, that’s what I’ve been calling it too ever since. I’ve had a pretty good life so far so I guess it must be lucky.

In terms of growth, where do you see travel industry by 2018?
Travelblogs will be much easier to navigate, you will be able to blog everything you see, instantaneously, from your cell phone or digital camera.

Whom would you recommend as my next Elite Blogger and why?
Mike Richard of Vagabondish

Give us your views on EliteChoice
Sorry “ but I’d never heard of it before.

Your turn! I am ready to answer a question for you.
What do you think online travel will look like 10 years from now?
Online Travel has a potential to turn that imaginative and impossible way of travelling to remote geographies possible. Thanks to platforms like blogging that has made this otherwise isolated arena quite interactive to the extent that it seems no less than a child’s play. I can foresee a day when people would throw their anniversary party at their favorite travel destination.

We wish good luck to Luc for his plans with Travelpod and look forward to new-features and expansion of Travelpod.