Sunday, October 20, 2002

Panhandling on the net What is it about bloggers that causes them to add a "tipjar" or some other means of begging for money on their sites?  The worst is one I have just found: Soapbox, who flatly states "I need $889.95 to continue blogging".  A note to Mr. Soapbox:  This fact itself, without knowing more, tells me that you ain't worth it. Tom Tomorrow says it better than I can: Also high on my list of grating terminology: self-congratulatory references to one's uncompensated output as "free ice cream" -- as if the entire goddamn internet consists of anything but free ice cream. For years, long before there were "blogs", hundreds of thousands of people were putting millions of pages of stuff up without any compensation and without any hope of compensation.  What makes bloggers any different? Update:  No sooner did I make this comment than Howard Bashman posted a link to Andrew Sullivan's column "Will Blog for Cash", published in last Sunday's Sunday Times.  He at least has a line on what can make free punditry pay off. 7:32:23 PM     There she goes again A lobbyist for Electronic Data Systems prepared an internal memo detailing its plan to gather about $30,000 in contributions for the Granholm campaign, "to secure our position now with the future governor."  EDS hopes to be the successful bidder on a very large IT contract in this state.  Now that this document has hit the press, Granholm is pedaling away furiously, cancelling the fundraiser where the donation was to be made, and vowing that she will not accept any money from EDS employees.  See "New memo says Granholm shows favor to donors" -- Michigan Daily, October 18, 2002 Meanwhile, Bill Ballenger's Inside Michigan Politics notes that Granholm remains in the lead "despite having run a truly vapid gubernatorial campaign."  I suppose that the saying is true in the end:  We will get the governor we deserve. 3:41:43 PM     The Phoenix Well, now I'm psyched. Mitch Kapor has just created a weblog which will chronicle his development of a new open-source personal information management product.  Kapor was one of the original developers of Lotus Agenda, the legendary early DOS-based PIM and probably the first prominent example of orphanware when it was dropped by Lotus because it was not generating millions of dollars of income per year.  Kapor later left Lotus (long before the IBM acquisition) to co-found the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  The PIM world has been urging Kapor to develop a Windows-based version of Agenda, and he's been "thinking about it", for at least ten years.  Now, it seems, he is getting started.  He is going further, though, in planning for this product as one which will seamlessly run on Windows, MacOS, and Linux.  We cannot wait. See also "Software idea may be just crazy enough to work", Dan Gilmor, SiliconValley.com 2:53:17 PM

© Copyright 2002 Franco Castalone. Last update: 11/1/2002; 7:57:52 PM.