Tuesday, February 22, 2005

PERMALINK

Personal publishing Jason Kottke, a Web veteran and longtime blogger whose work I've always respected and enjoyed, has quit his job to blog full time, and rather than go the advertising route, he's passing a patronage hat. I kicked in a wee bit and encourage you to do so as well if you are one of Kottke's readers, or if you become one. Making blogging pay is not easy; making any kind of online publishing pay, when you're hand-producing content, is hard, I can safely say, after a decade of trying. Sponsorships and advertising raise the same sorts of ethical concerns in blogs as they do anywhere else; even when you're ethically alert, you can't help facing tough calls pitting your duty to your readers against the demands of your advertisers. (J.D. Lasica's recent piece in the Online Journalism Review thoroughly explores this ground.) Some high-profile political bloggers (e.g. Sullivan, Marshall) have made a go of it as independent blogger/publishers outside of any institutional framework. But the passions of partisanship help open people's pocketbooks; it's brave of Kottke to try this from a perch largely outside the political fray. Personal publishing is a grand dream. Exactly ten years ago, in February 1995, I posted the first (and only) issue of my own Web magazine (warning: ancient HTML alert! Prehistoric navigation scheme ahead!). It's what I thought I'd end up doing, and if Salon hadn't come along, I probably would have given it my all. Today the tools are better, and our understanding of the power of the network is stronger and subtler, and if folks like Jason Kottke can make a go of it, we're all going to feel a little more free. comment [] 7:41:51 PM | permalink

Random links ## Some people think that it's a bad idea for government to get involved in helping organize local wireless networks. This great little post by Glenn Fleishman asks, what if we'd applied those arguments to the introduction of electricity 100 years ago?   Electricity is too important a resource for America’s future to be left in the hands of cities and towns, the council argues, which are inefficient enterprises that take profits from industry in their pursuit of ever-greater control of the flow of capital within their borders. "How big may these so-called public utilities grow in their efforts to stifle free enterprise and increase the size of government?" the report asks. The report notes that 97 percent of all neighborhoods in the U.S. have at least one functional electric street lamp running built through private enterprises’ effort, and that some urban areas have two electrical lamps on each corner, as well as lighting available at different times of the day and night both within and outside of homes and businesses. ## Cliff Figallo, who I once had the pleasure of working with at Salon, is blogging thoughtfully at "What Retirement?" about all the issues -- Social Security and otherwise -- facing today's workers as they ponder the (long, we all hope) tail end of their careers and lives. ## Annalee Newitz of the EFF deconstructs EULAs ("end user license agreements"), those boilerplate legal agreements we all click through without reading so that we can actually use commercial software. ## Leftie SF author China Mieville put together this list of "Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read" ## The hotel that inspired the greatest farce of the television age, "Fawlty Towers," has been sold. But how can the Patels, the new owners of Torquay's Hotel Gleneagles, possibly maintain its proud tradition of rudeness and incompetence? comment [] 7:27:11 PM | permalink

Fox blood on the tracks? A CNet columnist, Molly Wood, totally misunderstands what Firefox, and open source software, are all about. She's arguing that now that Microsoft has said it will issue an update of its browser, we can write Firefox off: "For a moment there, it looked like the tyrant IE could actually be overthrown. Those were heady days, weren't they? Well, they're over now... If IE 7 is even 50 percent more secure than current versions, the Firefox rebellion is finished. If IE 7 has tabs, Firefox will be destroyed as surely as the Hungarian uprising of 1956 was crushed by the Soviets... now that the sleeping giant has awakened, I think the buzzing gnat of the browser wars is about to be squashed flat." This is a prime example of one of journalism's worst habits -- a knee-jerk application of "who wins, who loses?" logic to situations where it doesn't really apply. "Finished." "Destroyed." "Crushed." "Squashed flat." This is the language of pro wrestling, sometimes adopted by business writers who are desperate to paint the typically colorless corporate world in the bright colors and action-packed imagery of sports. Yet the whole point of the open-source challenge to Microsoft is that it can't be "crushed" like a small commercial competitor. IE 7 may or may not cut into the extreme growth curve of Firefox adoption; but the people who are building the open-source browser will happily continue to fix their bugs and add their plugins and improve their product whether their adoption rate stalls out or not. And Firefox has already achieved critical mass in the market such that responsible Web site designers can no longer take the lazy "everyone uses IE" route. Naturally, everybody wants their work to be appreciated and their products to be used, and I'm sure the Firefox team are going to pay close attention to Microsoft's competition -- but I can't imagine them sweating the way the employees of a commercial startup in their shoes would. Microsoft can improve its browser from now till doomsday -- and if it does, we should applaud -- but there is no way it can "cut off the air supply" of an open source project the way it could "squash" a company like Netscape. Firefox's air is free. comment [] 11:42:16 AM | permalink