How Not To Blog ?

Jason Kottke, blogger extraordinairre, has resorted to begging. Jason recently quit his job as a circus clown in order to blog full time. He has a page where he takes Paypal payments and credit cards, and checks.

I almost donated $300 to his cause. NOT!

Get a f557ing job, moron! Do you think people will continue to support your pathetic cause? Why is it pathetic? Not because you're not a good blogger (you are) but because you haven't sold out yet. I know, I know.. you see the on-rush of other people making a nice living with their blogs (mostly through advertising and other sponsorships) and figure you can do the same thing. But you want to do it with a clean conscience, not accepting any advertising whatsoever. Only subsisting on the kindness of others through their financial contributions.

If it works, hundreds of other popular bloggers (read: not me) will try the same thing and the market for begging bloggers will be saturated, driving your profit margins below the grave and into a Chinese sweat shop.

Fucking advertise and get it over with. You already advertise yourself like a cheap hooker with lime-green spandex. And you advertise your ideas everyday, as well as products, services, people, and other websites you like. I can't count all the ads on your begging page in good time. However, I did catch your referral code in your Movaeble Type link pointing to www.movabletype.org/track/?kottke .. nice. It looks like you're a whore after all). You link everywhere buy up my grandpa's fat ass. But you will not do it for money. (At least, not yet.)

Pathetic sites like this one can't do it because nobody would want to advertise here. (I could always install Google Adsense. Heck, they'd take anyone.) Sell out already!

I will support your sponsor, but I will not sponsor you.

Great. One of the earliest color photos and it's of a guy taking a leak. There's some history for you. Heck, he might even be some famous general or something.

So many people see Google as god-like, they who can do no wrong.

When Google tries out new tools from their wonderful labs, some people have a fit, others gape in wonder (link).

Googling 'google evil' we find an article from IT world wondering if Google has opted-out of their abstract policy to do no evil. We also find Google Watch's page (see bottom).

Google's toolbar is what I will call 'evil creep' disguised as an enhancement to the user experience. "Wow it's so cool" delights. Everyone is happy. Google is a multi-billion dollar company whose concern is now to shareholders, not the public. Much like slowly boiling the frog, Google now has an obligation to exploit the respect and admiration of millions of its users (though the frog never had so much fun).

I remember America Online back in the day, so respected because it offered an easy way for thousands of people to navigate online when few others besides Prodigy and Compuserve could not have foreseen the internet's potential. Who doesn't know someone now who got burned and/or screwed by the company? Simply saying "AOL" is enough to make most smart people laugh uncontrollably. It is the nature of for-profit companies to take advantage of their customers, and squeeze them for all the money they can.

Google is no different now that they are public. They are obligated to turn higher profits than they did the year before. Their model rests almost entirely on Adwords profits, which is probably not a good idea. Soon the multitudes of fraudulent clicks will put a big dent in most of the PPC engines out there. That's what happens when you allow anyone to publish and make money from displaying your ads. Brazil and Romania Clicking Crus in the house!

I'm pretty sure Larry Page and Sergey Brin would have wanted to have their cake and eat it, too. I guess they'll just settle for watching their baby burn shi7 up while starting some other cool ventures in 2008.

Don't get me wrong. I would screw you, too, and invent things like GMail and such. It's nothing personal. It's just business.

It turns out that gay men are better at navigating than straight men.

Researchers at the School of Psychology, University of East London, have determined that homosexual men make better use of landmarks while navigating.

Could it be because most landmarks are shaped like penises? Any gay man can easily steer you down any wide or narrow metropolis with ease. All he would need is some KY.

How many times have I heard this from a passenger when driving?

Me: "So, do I go straight or turn?"
Not Me: "Never straight, baby! Gaily forward!"

The next study should try to find out why so many IT professionals are closeted homosexuals.