Archive for February, 2005

Jason Kottke started a website, kottke.org. That was a while ago, and since then the site has become perhaps one of the most popular weblogs out there. Now, kottke has made a startling announcement, in a recent post entitled, Doing kottke.org as a full-time job. Kottke says, “I recently quit my web design gig and — as of today — will be working on kottke.org as my full-time job.”

Color me jealous. Maybe I wouldn’t want to do it online, although that would be nice, but I sure would like to quit this night job and write all day long for a living. I guess I gotta pay my dues first, and that’s alright, I guess. Naturally, I’m curious about how he plans to pull of this stunt, and stay in the city, and keep his high speed internet, etc.

After a brief manifesto of reasons why he feels his decision to follow his own path is the right one, Kottke scored major points in my book when he said he’s also going to blog without advertising.

Like I said above, there’s got to be a way to support media that doesn’t involve advertising. But more than that, I don’t want to disrupt the relationship dynamic we’ve got going here. There are currently two parties involved with kottke.org: me and the collective you. Advertising introduces a third party. In my experience, the third wheel of advertising often works to unbalance the relationship in favor of either the author or the readers (usually in favor of the author). If ads were involved, I might feel the need to change what or how I write to appease advertisers. I might write to increase pageviews and earn more revenue. I could fill pages with ads, earning more revenue but making the content more difficult to read or pushing some content off the page entirely. You could block advertising and deny me needed revenue.

None of that is appealing to me. If I’m writing, you’re reading, I’m responding to what you’ve got to say about my writing, and we’re mixin’ it up in the comments, why do we need a middleman? Why not keep that dynamic intact if we can?

Kottke intends to fund his endeavors thanks to the support of those he would call “micropatrons” in the hopes that if a lot of people donate a little bit, then he can make it work. I suspect this will be augmented by freelance work. In fact, this whole stunt could be just another version of going freelance, depending on how it turns out, but lets hope for the best, shall we?

I thought it was interesting that Kottke linked to a shared philosophy of sorts, that being the “mission statement” of the company that runs a really nice piece of software called flickr. The company, Ludicorp, defines itself this way.

Our “corporate philosophy” has an excellent summary in the following passage from Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action and the Cultivation of Solidarity by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores & Hubert Dreyfus (MIT Press 1997):

Business owners do not normally work for money either. They work for the enjoyment of their competitive skill, in the context of a life where competing skillfully makes sense. The money they earn supports this way of life. The same is true of their businesses. One might think that they view their businesses as nothing more than machines to produce profits, since they do closely monitor their accounts to keep tabs on those profits.

But this way of thinking replaces the point of the machine’s activity with a diagnostic test of how well it is performing. Normally, one senses whether one is performing skillfully. A basketball player does not need to count baskets to know whether the team as a whole is in flow. Saying that the point of business is to produce profit is like saying that the whole point of playing basketball is to make as many baskets as possible. One could make many more baskets by having no opponent.

The game and styles of playing the game are what matter because they produce identities people care about. Likewise, a business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity.

The goal is to kick ass.