Category: Weblogging

I wish I could write a post like Kathy Sierra’s, full of love for my readers, but I’m cold and I’m cranky, really tired of being stuck at home and working on the book, and the most I can summon up is that I respect you, or at least those of you who make yourselves known.

Love implies that we can share our most intimate details of our lives, and frankly, you don’t want to get that intimate with me, and I know I don’t want to get that intimate with you. Sharing life’s little farts with each other isn’t necessarily entertaining, and why on earth would you want to read this site unless you received some enjoyment from the experience?

The same for me: why would I write just for you? No offense, but readers never stop demanding, have the patience of gnats, and flit from Big Thing to Big Thing, worse than a fly flits between piles of shit. I know, I’m a reader, too.

Every once in a while, we connect. I say something that works for you, or you write something in comments that works for me. Then the moment passes. While there are enough of these moments, you’ll find it worth your while to continue reading, and I’ll find it worth my while to continue writing.

Respect, yeah, that’s important. Agreement? Ha! Admiration? Preferably not, because the inevitable end for admiration is disappointed disillusionment. Can’t we skip the appetizer and just go straight for the disillusionment?

Like is good. We can like each other, but unless you’re telling me you’ll fund my long-fantasized trip to Australia, loan me the money to pay my taxes, or that I can come live with you, let’s not get mushy.

Not mushy, that is, unless you are willing to fund that trip to Australia, then hell yes, I love you.

Rogers Cadenhead:

Dave Winer is one of the best bloggers out there. He makes love to us with every post.

Ground control to Major Tom
Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you….

Here am I floating round my tin can
Far above the moon
Planet earth is blue
And there’s nothing I can do.

David Bowie, Space Oddity

Seth Finkelstein has a Guardian article up on paid blogging and high rent versus low rent bloggers:

There’s a class division, where membership is exclusive and expensive, while payment is common and cheap. But both are monetisation of attention. If we want there to be areas of human interaction which have some protection against commercial pressures, blogs stopped qualifying long ago.

This also follows on a discussion Dave Rogers has been having with Doc Searls this week. The ‘money quote’:

I am opposed to the unchecked expansion of commercial activity at the expense of social and political activities. Markets are not conversations, because conversations are a social activity, not a commercial one. But if you tell people markets are conversations, then it stands to reason that conversations are for sale.

We’re in no danger of losing our heads, what else would marketers have to market to? No, we’re in danger of losing the notion that life means something more than an economic calculation or a commercial transaction.

There’s a person I read off and on. This week the person has mentioned one company in several different posts. I almost wrote in comments, “Are you being paid by this company?”, but didn’t. Doesn’t matter, though, because I realized that I can never approach this person’s writing in the same way again. I doubt I’ll even continue reading their weblog.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Shel Israel, in comments to Robert Scoble’s post, where he mentions he’s being paid to be keynote speaker at the PayPerPost conference (yes, that PayPerPost):

Robert,
I am personally disappointed that you have chosen to do this. To me Pay for Post represents everything that the book you and I wrote opposes. I wish you would change your mind. This will not help your reputation.
…
One more thought, Robert. You taught me the standards for blogging that I adhere to. It is what you taught me that makes me so passionately oppose Pay per Post, who have shown themselves to be the sidewalk hookers of the blogosphere. Robert, I really hope you cancel. In the long run, you will be doing PodTech a service.

Now what was it Robert said, back in October about PayPerPost?

To hear that one of the illuminati is taking filthy lucre from the despised PayPerPost, after all such sneered at the little people who earned bucks to do things like, oh, pay rent or buy food, does demonstrate that too many people are quite willing to define rules they can’t live by themselves.

Speaking of which, there’s the Techcruch 20 conference, being billed as a humanitarian act to help the poor, financially burdened startups, being hosted by Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis. Oh if only someone will donate some space–I’m sure that neither Arrington nor Calacanis is going to benefit, personally, from such generosity.

They asked Dave Winer to be on the planning committee. Yup, three mentos sitting on a stick, just waiting for the diet coke.

Then there’s the Nick Denton and Gawker playfulness, where Gawker ads were sandwiched around copyrighted material and then uploaded to YouTube: probably one of the acts that triggered so much anger against YouTube and a mass DCMA take down effort:

For the past three months, an employee at Gawker Media has posted copyright videos sandwiched between ads for Gawker-owned properties such as Valleywag and Gizmodo.
…
At least 50 videos were uploaded by the Gawker employee since October from such shows as ABC’s Good Morning America and Inside Edition and CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360.

Perhaps Mr. Denton will have to resort to scrawling his ads on his own forehead, eh?

I know this is little interest for most of you, and I hope you’ll forgive me as I indulge in a spate of unseemly gloating as the White Boys with the Most tear themselves apart in front of our very eyes.

You guys are a real work of art, you know that?

And that’s enough of that.