Blogging for Bucks
22 February 2005, lunch time
Jason Kottke has decided to make running kottke.org his full time job. These are interesting times we live in. You may notice that I steal plenty of the links I post here from the man—28 links as of today—so I certainly wish him success in his venture. I’m tempted to donate I donated; I like his site a lot. There is a buzz building around this, with Megnut and Signal vs. Noise being the first two blogs I’ve seen to chime in. I predict by the end of the day the blogosphere will have imploded in on itself in some sort of linking orgy.
update: I donated. This whole venture seemed too stupid not to support. Also, being one who makes poor decisions with respect to my money on a very regular basis, I decided who am I not to support this man. Actually, donating money to a dude so he can write a weblog probably qualifies as a stupid way to spend my money.
update: In true Metafilter fashion, there is a snarky, omfg kottke sucks thread for you guys to enjoy. I predict it will be full of people bitching.
update: As I predicted, the MetaFilter thread was in fact full of people bitching. I think the reaction people had to Jason’s attempt at Blogging for Bucks is actually more interesting than the attempt itself.
The blogosphere has already imploded on itself in a linking orgy. That’s why I only read two blogs.
by rishi on February 22 2005, 1:35 pm #
Which two?
by ramanan on February 22 2005, 1:40 pm #
One of them is yours. The other is Tupac’s blog from beyond the grave.
by rishi on February 22 2005, 2:19 pm #
I don’t really read any other blogs other than yours. I mainly look at photoblogs. However, I think blogs can be a great resource when you have people writing about topics they know about or are interested in.
by mk on February 22 2005, 2:23 pm #
Ram, you know you really need to be saving for a certain something and not supporting people’s blogging ventures! But if this is the same dude that has the picture of his son with the little prince suitcase by all means go and donate on my behalf as well! :)
by sh!ma on February 22 2005, 2:42 pm #
Ram, You may also donate on mybehalf, with your own respective funds. Thanks.
by Victor on February 22 2005, 5:11 pm #
Sorry Shima, that was picture was by Fredrik from smudo.org. Victor i’ll get right on that. And I like the specialized blogs too, but I am a bigger fan of cool link blogs like Waxy.org and Kottke’s site. They are like Metafilter but without all the annoying people.
by ramanan on February 22 2005, 9:29 pm #
I am signing up for VCII. Fuck Kottke!
(I kid, I kid! He deserves everything for making blogs mainstream and for his awesome content.)
by Sunny on February 22 2005, 9:32 pm #
Yeah I saw Dean is offering life time hosting again (this time for $400 bucks). I’m going to wait and see what the state of the internet is when my 1and1 account runs out.
by ramanan on February 22 2005, 9:38 pm #
Man, I wish I had signed up at $200 though. But for now your 1and1 account is unbeatable.
The thing I like about Jason is that he didn’t opt for ads. That would have been the easy way out. It just goes to show that he cares for his readers.
by Sunny on February 22 2005, 10:34 pm #
Yep. He’s actually been quite vocal in the past about his aversion to advertising on Blogs, so it is nice to see he didn’t cop out. I wonder how successful this venture will be.
by ramanan on February 22 2005, 10:36 pm #
BTW, that MeFi thread is interesting. Goes to show that people are, well you know…
Hopefully the future of micro-payments doesn’t rest on the success (I don’t even want to think of failure…I wish him all the best in NYC) of this venture. Its not that Micropayments are a bad idea, its just we need a better mechanism than whatever is available at the moment. Probably the biggest challenge is protecting that balance between micro-patrons and non-patrons.
So any ideas? (Well there obviously aren’t many options. Jason probably thought about this a lot; he is a very cluey fellow; he still decided to go the Gruber way.)
by Sunny on February 22 2005, 10:48 pm #
Penny Arcade weighs in on this bold move.
by Dave on February 28 2005, 6:39 pm #