You won't make money blogging. At least not just blogging. Or so this article says. Here's another reason why selling information (content), on-line or otherwise, won't be very successful. If there is one thing that has to be present in a business model it's scarcity. The one thing common to selling furniture, gold, cookies, CDs, software, licensing patents etc., is the scarcity of the thing you're selling. Gold is a great example. I can't think of something less useful, less desirable and not even very pretty, than gold. Yet it's ridiculously expensive. Gold's value is artificial, it's a historical accident (gold was valuable because it was scarce in nature and as such was a great substitute of money when money didn't yet exist). We, as a society, perpetuate this historical accident. It only works because we all play the game. Now, salt is different but also demonstrates the crucial aspect of scarcity. Today I can get all the salt I'll ever need to consume in my lifetime for less than $100. You might not know it, but there was a time (a long time ago) when salt was terribly expensive because people didn't know how to produce it. It was scarce. Or you might have heard that around the time Columbus lived it was worth to make a very expensive expedition to get spices from other continents. The same thing that you'll get at QFC for a few bucks. Scarcity again.

So what is the problem in the business model that assumes that people will pay for content, say for the ability to read blogs? The problem is that there is no scarcity. There are too many blogs, too many newspapers, too many sources of information, too much music etc. They're all fighting for our attention but we just don't have the time to consume them all, even those that are free. In fact, the problem we're facing is the  opposite: we would be willing to pay for something that would filter all the available information and present only the stuff that we're interested in.

So why should you blog? Well, some people just like to blog. More business-oriented people might treat it as a great advertisement medium. Joel and Dave are masters at monetizing their blogging. They use blog to differentiate themselves from the faceless competition. Treat blogs as a self-promotion medium. Show how smart you are and build personal reputation. Treat it as an opportunity to create weak ties and network with similarly-minded people. Inspire other people with your blog and get inspired by them.     

I'm not the only one. Of course, I'm not the only one bothered by spam.     

An interview with Wozniak. Most of it seems to be just a repetition of what he said in his talk but he also talks about his new company.      

Give a spammer bad address. Just found this idea: put on your web pages bogus e-mail addresses. They will be harvested by spammers and will clog their address books. Nice, distributed idea although I don't think it'll work. It doesn't decrease the number of valid addresses that spammers have. There is no limit to how much addresses a spammer can keep (a 60 GB drive will store a lot of addresses), there really is no limit to how many e-mails they can send (it costs them next to nothing to send a piece of spam and not much more to send million of e-mails) and if worst comes they can easily mark as invalid all addresses that bounce e-mails (although when they start doing that, they'll have to expose a real e-mail address that can then be flooded and additionally one will be able to remove itself from the spammer's list by faking bouncing a message; I was doing that for some time (because fastmail.fm makes faking bouncing messages as easy as deleting them) but stopped since I didn't notice any decrease in spam). I don't like legislative solutions but I begin to think that anti-spam legislation is the only way to stop this madness. But then again I don't think it would stop spam from Korea.     

Spam, even more of it. Yahoo!Groups were relatively (if not completely) spam free. That was because spammers went for the lowest hanging fruit - blindly harvesting e-mail addresses from web pages. To send an e-mail to a Yahoo! group you first need to subscribe. Technically it's not hard to write a program to do it automatically and spam the group anyway but it looks like until recently it was hard enough or not interesting enough for the spammers. I just noticed that this is no longer true - I see an increasing number of spam messages on Yahoo! groups posted from clearly bogus e-mail addresses. It's easier to fight because (at least theoretically) one can block a spammer but there's nothing to stop him to re-subscribe with a different bogus e-mail address. This is an arm race and it's hard to see how we can fight spam effectively. For every technical trick to block spammers, they'll find a technical trick to overcome the block. Some even predict that at some point the increase of spam will make e-mail unusable. Do we need more than this plan?