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Wednesday, June 5, 2002
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 Wednesday, June 5, 2002
started 6/5/2002; 1:32:56 AM - last post 6/6/2002; 2:46:31 AM
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Doc Searls - Wednesday, June 5, 2002 
6/5/2002; 5:32:56 AM (reads: 10781, responses: 8)
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4 out of X ain't bad 
My piece on UnitedLinux just went up at the Linux Journal site. UnitedLinux is the mooshing together of four commercial Linux distributions that don't include Red Hat or its close relative, Mandrake.
If I'd had one I'd simply have been eaten
Hornswaggled compares former dotcom jobs to Krispy Kreme donuts.
She's front!
Halley kinda went and came.
Dot com ba ba ba boom
This kinda sucks.
Ouchware
My recent Geek Cruise experience had only one unhappy ending — for the new Titanium G4/800 I had been using. I was pushing a cart with three large bags and a pile of smaller ones through Customs and Security at Vancouver International Airport when my laptop bag fell off. I didn't think it hit the ground very hard and didn't expect the contents to be hurt; but when I opened the bag for inspection by the Security guy, the G4 was a mess. The case was so bent that the battery had fallen out, the bottom piece had been pried open, the keyboard had popped out and and the top wouldn't latch. I was completely shocked, and angry at mysef for not doing a better job of protecting the thing. (I gathered later that the laptop kind of wrapped itself around the camcorder that was also in the bag. The camcorder, a Sony PC-110, is a rugged little sucker, and survived.)
Of course, it wouldn't start, even when I put the battery back in. We stood there for about five minutes while I cursed under my breath, bent the thing back into something closer to working shape, and tried to explain to the security guy that I wasn't a terrorist, and that this thing wasn't a bomb. I think he finally let me go because there appeared to be no way somebody with no competence about carrying a bag would pose a threat to The System.
When I got into the airport lounge, several folks from the cruise were also there to gather in a joint wince when I showed them what happened. Incredibly, after a few gentle bendings of this and that, the thing seemed restored to roughly its original slab-like shape, and it actually worked. In fact, it's still working. I'm using it right now.
But next week I leave for Munich and London, and I don't want to make the same mistake again (this was the second time this has happened — I just can't find the link to the first story).
So I want to get a bag for this thing. Sal Soghoian, AppleScript's product manager, has a Dr. Bott TiCase. It's hard, slim, sexy, very tough, and even has a couple pop-up pedestals to let air circulate under the TiBook while it sits in the case on your lap. Sal showed it to me right after I showed up in the lounge with my busted machine. Good timing.
But the Dr. Bott is a mite bit expensive. If anybody has any other suggestions, let me know, before I strike again.
We're all blogmongers
Dave muses about Warblogs vs. Techblogs. I only became aware this morning that I was a techblogger. I remember discovering, after reading him for, like, months, that Ken Layne was a warblogger. Same with PhotoDude (who has been known to bristle at the label). Also James Lileks. Many warbloggers who love the term might be surprised to find that one of their newest and most intellectual members, Eric Raymond, is about as tech as they get.
I'd say techbloggers and warbloggers are two overlapping communities if I didn't also tend to sympathize with Andrew Sullivan, who gets the creeps when he hears the c-word. My community, such as it is, consists entirely of the links going in and out of this blog and the other stuff I write. It's not hard to make sense of it, but it's damned hard to make a label stick to it.
Even though it's fun to try.
Crediting out loud
Howard Feinberg in Kesher Talk quotes the Book of Esther: Anyone who quotes a statement in the name of the one who said it brings salvation to the world. He also points to a conversation in The Jewish Ethicist, and observes, "Most people in the business world never receive proper credit or attribution, but most writers (including myself) demand it."
Thanks to Hanan for the link.
New! Monetize your body functions!
Here's Henry Copeland in PressFlex:
| | ...blogs don't just excel existing media, they are beyond media. Blogs aren't nu-media but unmedia. Blogs are not rewired Daily Bugles, they are a ferocious crossbreed of Wal-Mart¹s cost-efficiency, distribution, and coordination with the Shakers' passion, patience and craftsmanship.
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| | Blogs don¹t just push the media envelope, they fly out of orbit on new trajectories.
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Agreeable stuff, indeed. But Henry's going somewhere with this, and it's not a place all of us will want to arrive at.
Advertising.
Seems Henry and PressFlex want to cash in on the Next Blog Thing:
| | ...we look forward to collaborating with blog technology peers to grow blogging's crumb-in-a-slice of the media pie into its own wedding cake. HTTPads is a great idea, if you like banners. Textads need classification and more flexibility for both buyer and seller. (Although omitted in the first edition of this article, I admire Blogsnob's name, elegant simplicity and network-boosting power.) Pyrads is a strong offering, but seems to be in hibernation since Blogger's growth accelerated. Userland, Movable Type, Pitas, Greymatter — we are eager to talk...
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| | To close, I will wager $1000 that on May 25, 2007 there will be more Blogads than NYTimes.com classified ads or that NYTimes.com will be using Blogads. Ready to bet, Martin? (Yes, the winnings will go to the Blog Foundation.)
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Here's the deal. There is exactly one form of advertising that speaks directly to reader demand, and that's classifieds. I know of only one site on the Web that has even begun to approach the simple efficiency of classifieds for meeting reader demand, and that's Google. They succeed not just because the ads answer reader demand (if they do, it's a plus, though many — perhaps most — of them don't), but because they subtract the least possible value from the the search results with which they appear.
But even if PressFlex finds a way to make Google-like advertising work with blogs, I would not have the least bit of interest in running those ads on my blog.
Three reasons: 1) I don't blog for money; 2) I don't want to ever think of this blog as an "environment" for advertising, or anything other than writing and links; and 3) No reader has ever asked me to put advertising on this page.
That last reason is enough for me. This blog will be neither crumb nor slice in anybody's media pie.
I wish Henry luck. He clearly gets what blogs are about. And there are clearly plenty of bloggers who would gladly carry advertising. So maybe there's a market there. But it's one that will exist between bloggers and advertisers. Not between bloggers and readers.
[Later...] Dori responds:
| | Ummm... Doc? Go re-read Dave's piece on How to Make Money on the Internet, particularly where he says: As you get to know your community, stars will emerge. Give them space on your home page and run ads on their sites. And then re-read the TOS you agreed to when you set up your weblogs.com site.
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Context: Dave opens that section of his essay with "Suppose you run a newspaper in Singapore." He's addressing newspaper journalists, not bloggers. Big difference.
He adds (still addressing publishers), "Spread the new wealth around. And never ask what the Internet can do for you, always do things that just do one thing, grow the Internet, help it reach into the community you define. If you follow this formula, you can't lose..."
The minute this blog turns into an intellectual property business, or the minute that I need to "monetize" it in some way, it will have a different purpose than the one that brings readers to it now.
This blog isn't a business. It's a personal journal. It's here because I like to scatter my own intellectual and artistic goods, along with those of others around the Net. Maybe taking money for that wouldn't be a hassle or subtract much value. And maybe some day Dave will want Userland to sell advertising here. If he does, that's his choice. Again, I believe advertising would subtract value — from his blog as well as mine.
But I'm speaking for myself here. Everybody's entitled to make money any way they please. And we don't all have the same readers. Some bloggers may have readers who have no problem with advertising, and might even welcome it.
For journalists who blog for a living, or who want their blogs to make money, I believe selling directly to readers — the public broadcasting model, roughly — offers those readers a far more respectful exchange than any form of advertising makes possible. It's also much more efficient, since 100% of the readers who pay presumably believe they're getting something of value for the money.
Interesting... I was about to say that I avoided visiting Declan McCullagh's Politech site because it usually carries extremely annoying blinking banner ads on otherwise all-text pages. But now he offers three ways to make donations. I just used one of them (Amazon's, which works and makes the whole thing easy) to donate the default value of $15. It still has banner ads (for Motley Fool, which doesn't interest me). I hope he gets rid of them.
[Later still...] Dave points out that he wrote the quoted HTMMONTI piece a long time ago, and that another one, written last year, updates it. I'll have more to say about this soon (as will Dave). Stay tuned.
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Dori Smith - Re: New! Monetize your body functions!
6/5/2002; 6:55:10 AM (reads: 556, responses: 4)
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Doc Searls - Re: New! Monetize your body functions!
6/5/2002; 4:37:05 PM (reads: 670, responses: 3)
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I just responded on the blog, as an addendum to the post.
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Dave Winer - Re: New! Monetize your body functions!
6/5/2002; 6:17:34 PM (reads: 1388, responses: 2)
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Now, my two cents.
That article was written in the last months of the dotcom mania.
The question came up many times at Davos. So I wrote up what I told them. There's the context.
I wrote another piece, following up on that one, in 2001, that incorporated the dotcom bust.
http://davenet.userland.com/2001/02/13/howToMakeMoneyOnTheInternetV20
BTW, I know one newspaper that is building on the model of the HTMMONTI thread. It's not public yet, but hopefully will be soon.
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Dave Winer - Dori, where does it say we can run ads on hosted sites?
6/5/2002; 9:47:41 PM (reads: 626, responses: 0)
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Dori Smith - Re: New! Monetize your body functions!
6/5/2002; 10:04:48 PM (reads: 904, responses: 1)
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Dave,
That's the same model used by Geocities and BlogSpot, for the most part. The main difference between them and what you announced in Davos was they sold the ad space from the beginning so that no one was suprised. My take on this is that you were waiting to see which sites were hits before selling the space, and then the bust happened and took the ad banner market with it.
Hey, I'm a happy capitalist with a mortgage, so I'm the last person to say that making money is bad, or that you need to supply people with hardware and software out of the goodness of your heart. But to the best of my knowledge, the TOS in place at the time that Doc started his blog incorporated what you said in your Davos speech, and what Doc said last night implied (to me, at least) that he didn't recall having given permission for ads to run on his blog.
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Dave Winer - Re: New! Monetize your body functions!
6/5/2002; 10:21:36 PM (reads: 953, responses: 0)
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You got it all wrong Dori. Nice fantasy.
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Dori Smith - Re: Wednesday, June 5, 2002
6/5/2002; 10:27:46 PM (reads: 590, responses: 0)
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Dave,
I may be conflating my recollection of your TOS and your discussions at the time about selling ads--it certainly appears so. There's nothing in there about not selling ad space, and your Davos piece and things you said on Scripting News all made it clear that that was your plan.
I'd thought that you'd given members some kind of warning about your plans for revenue, and the TOS would have been the obvious spot for that.
I guess if the bust hadn't happened at that point, and you had sold ad space (ala BlogSpot) you could have said to complaining members, "Hey, you should have read the DaveNets that I've been publishing," but that still could have led to some potentially ugly situations.
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Bernie Dunham - Re: Wednesday, June 5, 2002
6/6/2002; 6:46:31 AM (reads: 647, responses: 0)
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You should get the James Bond briefcase for your Titanium and write it off as a business expense at tax time. Aside from it looking so cool, it's functionality seems obvious. I'm going to see if there is one for my IBM ThinkPad.
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