I dont know if I like this redesign. but Ben Hammersley told me, when we were watching otters in Florence, that he was paying his hosting bills with Google ads, so I thought I would try them. Also, putting ads on this site and seeing what happens is one way to discover whether it is commercial or not. This matters.
In case there is anyone reading this who does not run their own blog, the back story is simple. This site, like almost all the important and fancy ones, runs on software called Movable Type. It’s complicated to learn, powerful to use, maddening to tweak: in fact thoroughly Unix-ish. What you see is nothing like what you get, and neither what you see not what you get is often what you want. But once the system is set up and working, you can very easily make new blogs about anything. It took at most five minutes to make a private playroom for the FWB and her best friend, for instance.
Until recently, it was free for private or non-commercial use. Donations were encouraged, and commercial users had to buy a licence. But you could use it for free if you wanted to. I gave them $50 when I started using it, because it was so useful. But I didn’t think of this site as a very commercial enterprise. MT, which started as a smart young married couple working on a hobby project, must have gained many more donations, because it turned into a company, Six Apart, gained some venture capital, and hired a few employees, among them some very high-profile bloggers like Anil Dash.
Last week, they announced Version 3, and all hell broke loose. Anyone who uses it on a large scale, even privately, is meant to pay. There will be a free version, but it will only allow three blogs and one author. The fees for the supported versions are by no means exorbitant, but they strike hardest at the keenest users, since the charge rises with the number of blogs and authors on a site. This makes sense in a commercial context — obviously — but it makes life impossible for the kind of enthusiastic amateur who has been the spine of MT development up till now: the people who have made all the little add-ons that make it fun and worthwhile. Someone who has set up eleven blogs for lots of friends could find themselves facing bills of hundreds of dollars. It’s true that no one has to upgrade and pay for the new version, but that has done nothing to dampen the excitement. The sort of person who sets up eleven blogs for free will always want to upgrade everything as soon as it is possible.
Some of the most prominent of that kind of bloggers have migrated to something called WordPress, which is GPL, and thus free forever. Mark Pilgrim wrote a memorably snotty note announcing that it would cost him $535 to upgrade under the new license, so he was donating the money to WordPress instead. The principle that mattered was not whether the MT developers should get paid, but whether they should be free to change their licence terms. If they will do this now, who knows what they will do later?
In the long run, he announces, the value of all non-free software approaches zero. To this one is tempted to retort that in the long run the value of all software approaches zero, and the free stuff generally has less far to travel. But he is a man who uses emacs, and gets into ferocious arguments about syndication formats. He is concerned with the value of software to a programmer, who builds it into his own constructions. I just want it to work. The value of software to me is that it lets me write and publish without fuss. Things like emacs have in that sense negative value, whatever they may cost in money. I am not going to bother to learn an entirely new templating language (PHP) in order to turn this into a wordpress blog which looks exactly as it does at present. It’s not as if the words are locked up in MT. They all live in a mySQL database which is as free as free can be.
There are larger issues, though. It is important, if it is to persist, that blogging should be a moderately profitable activity. If Ben and Mena Trott can’t make a living out of blogging tools, no one will be able to. On the other hand, blogging isn’t, and can’t be for most individuals, profitable. I get about 500 page views a day, which is pretty reasonable, I think (I’m not sure how RSS hits are measured). Something like 30,000 people pay for the Wrap, which carries a plug for this site every Friday. This is better than most blogs are going to do from a standing start and it is gratifying to the ego. It’s not, though, a generator of income. Last quarter, I made $13.95 from referrals to Amazon. That doesn’t feel like a commercial enterprise to me.
Perhaps I should concentrate on making Helmintholog a commercial powerhouse; but I don’t think there are many prospects of success. The blogs with devoted readerships have several characteristics. They are regularly updated. I can manage that. But beyond frequency, they offer either a closely focussed viewpoint unavailable elsewhere, or a community of friends. If you want to know about Iraq, you have to read Juan Cole. If you’re interested in Mars, you have to read Oliver Morton. But if I have any indispensable thoughts on important subjects, I try to sell them to newspapers, for money. What’s here is sometimes a draft of later pieces. But you wouldn’t use it to mug up for mastermind unless your specialist subject were the thought of Andrew Brown. So, on balance, I think I will take out a non-commercial licence for MT 3.
It’s odd. A good proportion of the stuff I write is that pseudoblog of my diary, and someone thinks it makes commercial sense to pay me to do it. (There are even occasional suggestions that it should really become a daily blog, although for various reasons that’s not a good idea.)
I probably shouldn’t say here how many hits it gets, but it’s not going to appear on any adman’s radar any time soon. I can’t really see what the commercial justification is. Were I to depart the mumsy embrace of CNet and self-publish, could I see a fraction of my salary? Absolutely not.
So I think you should get yourself a sponsor, Mr Brown, and vaguely promise to write the odd piece that covers whatever ground that sponsor cares about in exchange for regular shipments of cash. I think people who were so sponsored used to be called columnists, but we must move with the times.
R
1) I do wish there were an url I could use for your diary, or, better, an RSS feed.
2) I have two columns already in various places, and I am paid for them. I am also paid, already, for a whole lot of work that I mostly love doing for the Guardian. With a little more self-discipline and courage, neither impossible, I could get on with getting paid for all sorts of things. but I still like having a half-finished place, which this is, where I can ramble informally with friends.
i’m kind of more interested in blogs if they are not being commercial- things that people make money off of they inevitably feel they have to hold to some standard to, and it’s all downhill from there. i like how you write when you feel beholden to no one and nothing, and how you stop when you’re busy or not feeling prolific. in the 90’s, when i consulted on such things, i used to describe the internet as a giant conversation. everybody seemed to spend the next few years turning it into a performance. blogs have brought the conversation back into prominence.
also, the new formatting breaks slightly under moz/win xp.
Oh, hello, Quinn. Are you coming over with Danny for this conference thing?
As the to the other stuff — I like to, like, keep some standards even in conversation of coherence, and like comprehensibility. So I don’t feel I have to write when I have ntohgin to say; but what is said, should be amusing if it can’t be interesting.
I shall go and shove some more divs into the formatting. It breaks in Firefox, too. Thanks for pointing it out.
About the RSS feed: try
http://feeds.zdnet.co.uk/rss/0,39026141,21000007c
,00.htm
R
Here’s a little tip to help you on your commercial enterprise: adjust the colours of the Google Ads so that they blend in with the rest of your colour scheme and don’t stand out like an ugly ad banner. After all, that’s the idea behind text ads: make them appear as close to editorial content as possible, albeit with a little (‘ads by google’) disclaimer.
Yes. But I store colours in the rgb(23,45,123) format, and google wants them as a string of hex. there will be a converter somewhere online. I can’t find it right now.