I Deserve a Little Credit

This week I paid off my last student loan, 15 years after I graduated from the University of North Texas, and brought an aggravating credit card debt down to $0. A five-year car loan is two payments from completion.

Matt Haughey's celebrating the demise of his own student loan and other debts:

All told, we'll be saving around a thousand bucks a month that would normally been sent away, which isn't too bad at all, especially on an annual basis ($12 grand in my pocket!). Then I started looking at all my bills as annual raises.

I feel closer to Sallie Mae than Haughey does, because she helped me stretch college out to 6.5 years without taking a job in the food service industry.

But the heady feeling of knocking off a long-term debt is great. I wish it felt as good as watching a brand-new high-definition television with no payments until January 2008.

2006/08/24 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Cry Me a News River, Dave Winer

Dave Winer boasts about earning millions in revenue last year by blogging.

Over in another part of the tech blogosphere they're having a discussion about blogs that make big money. I still think Scripting News has the record there, by a wide margin.

Last year we did $2.3 million in revenue. Expenses? One salary (mine) and about $1000 per month in server costs. A few thousand for contract programming. Pre-tax profit? Millions.

His claim to have made seven figures blogging is a stretch, since he's referring to the sale of Weblogs.Com, which wasn't an extension of Scripting News. The service also relied on the largesse of other programmers to keep it running -- me for six months and several people at UserLand Software before that. (That's a recurring theme in many of Winer's accomplishments -- share the work, hog the credit -- going back as far as Frontier and ThinkTank, for which Doug Baron and Dave's brother Peter Winer are too infrequently described as cocreators.)

But I'll agree that he's got a killer strategy for turning a high-traffic blog into bling:

People think blogs are about advertising, and I would agree, but they're thinking in terms of clicks and eyeballs, and I'm thinking of technology that's created using the intelligence of community participation. ... We will get a whole new flow built here, through persistent experimentation, refinement, listening, promoting, thinking, and looping.

I can't think of another technologist who is better at singlehandedly getting people to buy into his ideas, whether they're good ones like XML-RPC or inconsequential ones like a simple mobile RSS hack, which is being touted as something revolutionary by Jeff Jarvis, Dan Farber, Read/Write Web and Dave himself:

I've not been so excited or so sure about a new direction for mobile technology since podcasting in June 2004. I'm sure we'll look back on this as a turning point for mobile news.

Now that I'm on the outside of this phenomenon, I have to laugh at how he's able to portray mobile news reading as completely uncharted territory. If mobile developer Russell Beattie was still blogging, I'm sure he'd be asking himself, "Why didn't I think to put news headlines on a no-graphics page for easy reading on your PDA or phone? Genius, thy name is Dave Winer!"

But it's sad clown laughter, like that unreleased Jerry Lewis movie from the '70s. In six months, we'll all be arguing about whether Winer invented mobirivercasting singlehandedly, as Robert Scoble believes, or must share the credit with others.

Rss · Business · Atom · 2006/08/23 · 11 COMMENTS · Link

Blogger Wants to Beat Jeremy Coon

Napolean Dynamite producer Jeremy Coon and aspiring filmmaker Rhys Southan attended the same Richardson, Texas, high school that I did (many years later). Because of this coincidence, I found Beat Jeremy Coon, Southan's amusingly bitter blog in which he details his effort to become more famous than Coon before their 10-year reunion in 2007.

I originally thought the desire to beat Jeremy Coon was just a gimmick, but a recent interview on his blog suggests otherwise. Southan found Mike Perry, Coon's former roommate at Brigham Young University. They haven't spoken since Coon reported him for an "honor code" violation -- letting his fiancé spend the night -- which resulted in Perry being expelled from school.

The interview's long, but it picks up when Perry describes his expulsion and decision to stop being a Mormon:

BJC: What was it like leaving the church? Had you had doubts before, or was it a sudden break once you were kicked out?

Mike Perry: Actually? It was a lot like dropping a class. I just stopped going. I got an extra day of the week back and a 10% raise. I had slight doubts before because of several issues, including why for the same transgression Bishops hand out different punishments. I almost got in a fist fight in the dining with my ex-fiancé's Bishop because he thought I was getting off too easily for having her spend the night (we had confessed to try and clear it up, but then continued doing it). Initially I thought he was the one who turned us in to the honor code. Another doubt I had was about there only being a single correct religion, period.

BJC: Do you wish you could have been happy living the Mormon life?

Mike Perry: Could I have been happy living the Mormon life? Ultimately, probably not. It forces you into avoiding things I think are natural, like masturbation or having sex with someone before you promise to spend the rest of eternity with them. No one wants to be surprised with a dead fish.

Movies · 2006/08/19 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Finding Good Soundbites in Bad Podcasts

Correction: The original version of this entry quoted Jason Calacanis for something that was said by Michael Arrington. I apologize to both for the error. The original was more interesting than this version. I apologize to the readers.

I was listening to the latest episode of the Gillmor Gang this morning, one of the best-known and longest running tech podcasts. I endured 20 minutes of directionless chit-chat, complete with a five-minute "how good was this show?" self-evaluation, to hear one provocative 35-second comment from Michael Arrington that's worth passing around.

I committed suicide this week when I wrote about AOL. Those three AOL posts cost me dearly. I'll explain it all in a few weeks. It cost me more than ... not money, it cost me in something else that translates into money eventually. I made a conscious decision and I paid the price, hoping that I'd get away with it but I didn't.

Finding this nugget in the noise reminds me of what podcasting offers that blogging lacks: Content that sucks in two dimensions. A bad podcast suffers both in quality and in the amount of time required to find this out. I could've back-buttoned 60 bad blog entries in the time I listened to one Gillmor Gang.

Podcasting · 2006/08/16 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

The Politicians and the Possums

In Florida, we're subdeveloping the rural parts of the state out of existence as fast as we can, but there's still a significant rural vote that requires pandering in the panhandle.

Every election year, national and statewide candidates in Florida must prove they are good country folk by mistreating a possum at the Wausau Possum Festival.

Candidates bid for a possum, taking it out of a holding area by its tail and giving it a shake to terrify the creature into going limp so it won't claw them. They're later fed and released into the wild (the possums, not the politicians). Katherine Harris bid $400 for hers.

"That gal knows how to shake a possum," the auctioneer drawled.

Gubernatorials candidate Tom Gallagher and Rod Smith paid $475 and $250, respectively, for their possums. Smith dangled his limp possum on his campaign site. Gallagher taunted Charlie Crist, the GOP rival he outbid.

"He didn't look like he wanted to touch it," Gallagher said.

Florida · 2006/08/16 · 41 COMMENTS · Link

Dell Recalls 4.1 Million Laptop Batteries

Dell is recalling 4.1 million batteries from its laptop computers because they have the unfortunate tendency to burst into flame, as these photos demonstrate.

The recall covers four models of Dell laptops sold from April 2004 to July 2006:

Potentially affected batteries were sold with the following models of Dell notebook computers or separately as secondary batteries:

• Latitude: D410, D500, D505, D510, D520, D600, D610, D620, D800, D810
• Inspiron: 500M, 510M, 600M, 700M, 710M, 6000, 6400, 8500, 8600, 9100, 9200, 9300, 9400, E1505, E1705
• Precision: M20, M60, M70, M90
• XPS: XPS, XPS Gen2, XPS M170, XPS M1710

This isn't the first time that Dell laptop components had fire problems. Last year, I received a letter from Dell notifying me that the power adapter on my Inspiron was a fire and electrical hazard.

Security · 2006/08/15 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

Help! Help! You're Being Repressed!

An excerpt from a recent comment to Workbench:

Ha! I beg you to censor this! It will be the premier coup in my lodge, Rogers -- proving every single word I've written ...

I granted his wish and deleted the comment.

Fear of being called a censor used to work on me, because I believed that a commitment to free expression on the Internet meant giving wide latitude to readers who took the time to comment, even when they were hostile, abusive or obscene -- especially when I was the target of their wrath.

I have all the power on my servers, so it seemed unfair to use any of that editorial discretion to silence a critic. Part of this belief was motivated by seeing how many times web hosts will drop a controversial site when its content generates hate mail. The Bonsai Kitten spoof couldn't find a host willing to publish it amid a barrage of complaints by enraged cat fanciers.

I also wanted to win an argument I had with Jerry Pournelle and his cronies a million years ago on GEnie. He was the censorious host; I was the crank who believed the deletion of my post was the "coup in my lodge." How dare a writer, who draws his living from speech for which our ancestors fought and died, suppress the speech of others! As I recall, I was so insufferable in the ensuing discussion I'd like to travel back in time and flame myself.

After a decade of publishing on the web, I finally reached my screw-that moment regarding censorship a few months ago. Someone else can carry the First Amendment flag. The speech here isn't free to me -- it's $225 a month plus labor. Telling someone you have a right to free speech on their site is like walking into their house and demanding a ham sandwich.

The most I now offer is an attempt to moderate fairly, save deleted comments briefly in case you want them back, and provide advice on setting up your own site to get out from under the thumb of the man.

Anyone who doesn't like these rules is free to post somewhere else.

Publishing · Censorship · Moderation · 2006/08/15 · 33 COMMENTS · Link

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