All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

"Weblog Foundation", my ass

gnat on 2002-05-14T16:26:02

Stupid idea demolition time! Another attempt to turn a sacred cow into a cash cow. Let me see how many ways this is dumb:

  • I don't pay to learn what happened in the world, and I sure as hell won't pay to find out what J. Random Loserblogger thinks.
  • Foundations are the third-best form of support. The best form of support is for the work itself to be self-supporting with the customers directly paying the creator. The second best form of support is for the employers of the workers to be paid by the customers, and the workers are then paid by their employers.

    In a non-profit foundation type of affair, not every worker can be funded, and the funding is done through (frankly) humiliating begging and fundraising rather than the more seemly payment for services rendered. And, as we're discovering, to break the cycle of annual "please please give us money", you have to spend money on a professional fundraiser and work at making yourself palatable to granting organizations and doing all this work and staying sane is far from easy.

  • It's being pitched as "let's find a way to make money off our blogs!" In my opinion, blogging (like open source software) is a volunteer movement. You only need a foundation when critical infrastructure isn't being provided by the volunteers, or at a reasonable cost by the market. Blogging has no shortage of software or reasonably-priced hosting sites.
  • Finally, "advertising on selected weblogs"? Selling advertising is whoring yourself. And not high-class whoring, it's crack ho-ing. If you can't make money any other way, you can always find a porn site willing to pay for clickthroughs. Advertising is what you do when people won't actually pay for your content.
--Nat

don't throw stones

hfb on 2002-05-14T18:38:10

Unless the house you inhabit is made of tempered glass.

Re:don't throw stones

gnat on 2002-05-14T18:56:51

Anyone who doesn't think I had the Perl Foundation in mind when I wrote the second bullet item needs their head read :-)

--Nat

Re:don't throw stones

hfb on 2002-05-14T20:03:53

:) or TPI for that matter. There's a foundation or non-profit for seemingly everything these days so it's utterly unremarkable that someone got the bright idea for blogging foundation...there are worse things they could do with their time and someone elses money :)

Re:don't throw stones

gnat on 2002-05-14T20:25:49

My (mental) response to every request for funding at YAS is the same I had to the blogging foundation idea: "why don't you just get a job?" :-)

It takes someone special to make it through that filter :-)

--Nat

Re:don't throw stones

hfb on 2002-05-14T20:32:09

That particular question is a popular one these days :)