Paul Stamatiou is a 20 year old blogger who writes at PaulStamatiou.com, and previously worked as an intern for Yahoo!. This is the first interview in a series which will run it’s course over the next month (one interview per week).

Firstly Paul, when and why did you venture into the blogosphere with PaulStamatiou.com?

I started blogging back in the summer of 2005. It started out as curiosity about various blog CMSs. I started playing around with WordPress, thought it was pretty cool and bought the PaulStamatiou.com domain. I’ve been blogging ever since.

You recently served a stint at Yahoo! working as an intern, what’s was the best experience you took out of your time there?

I’m not sure I can narrow down my Yahoo! journey to one particular experience but I got to meet tons of great people, enjoy California for the first time, as well as learn how things work at a big internet company. After the first week I was in California, I knew I had to
move out there as soon as I graduate.

Your personal blog has only been running for just under two years, but has over 4000 RSS readers. What three main factors have combined to make that happen?

Actually, my blog is closer to 1.5 years old but it’s still been around a while, in one design or another. I’ve gotten to where I am now with pure dedication, a passion for learning as well as a passion for sharing that knowledge. I try to blog every day and I hope to have a “big post” once a week.

Are there any tools you have discovered over the time you’ve been running your blog which help you create and write posts with higher efficiency.

Not really. I’ve pretty much been doing the same thing now that I was a year ago. However, I couldn’t blog nearly as fast as I do now without live spell checking in Firefox 2.0 and my dictionary widget in OS X. Sometimes my dictionary widget can’t find words so then I resort to Ninja Words.

Your blog is part of the 9rules Network, what noticeable advantages have you gained being part of the network?

I thoroughly enjoy being part of 9rules because of the community surrounding the network. Everyone in 9rules has been a great help and I know I can turn to them when I have a question - technical or not.

Do you have a set posting schedule, or do you just write blog posts when one strikes you?

I don’t have a set schedule at all. My posting frequency and time depends on whether there is any urgent tech news, such as an Apple announcement, and on how much school work I have at the moment. Generally, I’ll have an idea about a post but be too busy with school work to do it then so I’ll put a Post-it on my iMac. I have about 7 Post-its on my iMac right now.

What’s your process. and what tools do you use in the process off finding something to blog about, through to writing and publishing the post.

If I find something interesting I want to cover online, whether I first hear of it from Digg, TechMeme, Etcetera, I generally make a draft and throw a bunch of relevant links in there. When I have more time, I go back and read/research through all relevant information and
come up with my own way of presenting the news or issue to my readers.

I like getting the big picture before blogging about things. I use the WordPress admin panel for posting pages as I can’t live without the post preview. The first thing I do is write up a rock solid introduction paragraph with a few sentences that fully describe what the post will be about.

I always use the more tag after the intro so on my homepage people can get a quick feel for what each post is about.

What provides your energy, your drive, and your inspiration to keep blogging on a daily basis?

Redbull! Haha, that may keep me awake at 5am when finishing up computer science projects, but I get my blogging drive from my readers. I thrive off of comments. They let me know that someone’s listening to what I have to say. I could careless about the traffic I get or the money I make, which at this point isn’t anywhere near enough to pay my rent.

But more than all that is my desire to learn about new things. I absolutely love discovering new services and products that impact me and others like me in some way.

What on piece of advice do you have to those who have already started a blog, and want to make it a success?

Keep blogging, regardless of the numbers of readers you have or your traffic. It took me many months to get what I would call a decent level of traffic and dedicated readers that would comment on posts. If you have lots of readers but not many comments, perhaps you’re not blogging about the right things or talk about your personal life too much. I always like to make posts open-ended and ask for responses by asking related questions.

What are your views on the Full RSS Feeds vs Partial RSS Feeds debate? Which do you support?

Full feeds are the only way to go. As long as I have a full feed, I don’t care how many advertisements it may have, I’ll still be happy. End of story.

Ten blogs you love reading are..?

Oh wow, I don’t think I can come up with 10 blogs right on the spot..there are just so many. But I do check out UNEASYsilence, TUAW, The Apple Blog, Jeremy Zawodny’s blog, Yodel Anecdotal, Torrentfreak, and Valleywag almost daily.