Reality Check III
… Wherein your humble author whines about trivial sidebar items, while others blog without so much as a roof over their head.
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Andrew
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Andrew
Flung Open are the Gates of Hell!
So after spending the last two days setting up my blogging system’s Photo Gallery I’ve nixed it in favour of a link to my free Flickr account. It joins the very long list of my del.icio.us tags under a heading titled “The Great Beyond…”, in the right-hand sidebar about halfway down this very page.
Blog snobs will argue that I shouldn’t embed content from external sites on my own index page—if Flickr and/or del.icio.us ever go tits-up or are even put offline temporarily for maintenance then the result is a lot of empty screen real estate for valued readers like you. On the other hand, I’m not taking design advice from anyone who has Google Ads littered all over their own site.
Heck, all I really want to do is get to tagging like the rest of you…
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Andrew Currie
Please note that I’ve changed “The Great Beyond…” to the more pedestrian “External Links”. It just seemed a little less ghey.
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Andrew
For Love or Money
To beg or not to beg? An interesting question, leading to one that’s probably a lot more important…
If you’ve visited my site in the last twelve hours you might have spotted this innocuous little button. It’s gone now, partly because of a friend of mine’s negative reaction to it. She thought it was “vulgar” and amounted to “cyber-panhandling”.
To be honest, I hadn’t put that much thought into it; an option for readers to make a donation was just one more feature I was adding to my site, and really a knee-jerk “me too” to what I’ve seen on other blogs. I hadn’t considered a specific use for donations I received; I just wanted to see if I would receive any.
Instead this little PayPal button sparked a lengthy discussion about the Internet economy — you know, the usual blah blah blah about democratizing the means of publication and monetizing content when everybody expects a free ride, myself included. There a couple of places I regularly visit that ask for handouts, like Pierre Bourque’s excellent Newswatch site; I always say with a certain amount of smugness that I’m going to make a donation, and yet I never do. In the back of my mind is the nagging voice of a cheapskate, whining that I already fork out forty bucks a month just to get on the ‘Net at a reasonable speed… Why should I have to pay to visit web sites too?
So on this, the morning after, I’m left with a bit of a conundrum: Why is it that we pay for computer equipment and software when it’s the content and interaction that makes it valuable to begin with? I’m starting to think we’ve been scammed…
Michelle Bailey is discussing. 
Michelle Bailey 10:50 PM on March 3, 2006 Permalink |
This post, along with the comment I heard from one of the regular street people in my neighborhood make about ‘not making quotas’ today, makes me think that homelessness has evolved.