We write. Most of us are long-tail writers web publishing for free. Few of us connect to the trad publishing world, fewer still have writing careers. I for one would take money. I would like a lot of people to read my work. Some of it is work. Writing at its best for me is not work, but editing… that’s work. I read Jeneane and I am awed by her presence, her clarity. I read Shelley and I respond to her acerbic yet insightful commentary. Madame Levy floors me with her art. Chris Locke amazes me with his relentless scholarship. Ray Sweatman, a superb web publishing poet, has a poem up… I’ll bet he’d like you to read it. I’ll bet he’d take money for the work. How do we pay our poets?
There’s a cultural barrier in the blogosphere that the great communicators, we bloggers, have a hard time talking about. We’re writing in public because we want to share our work. Some of us would be pleased to measure success in dollars and hit counts and cross links. How do we promote this?
My practice is to share my experience and to share my likes and dislikes. Through it all I would prefer to develop cordial, friendly relations with others. But what if I create some friction, heat up my interactions from time to time, start a fire with that heat? Is there anything wrong with that if the people find the fire illuminating? What if I don’t agree that Dave Winer is an unreconstructed sexist, but rather acknowledge that some of my friends find him challenging as can be? What if I LIKE Kathy Sierra, find her amusing, if occasionally a little brittle? What if I found Scoble just as warm and charming as everyone says he is when I finally met him face to face? If I link to these high traffic bloggers, am I guilty of “link baiting?”
Who the heck am I anyway? Should I jump in and defend Kathy and Dave when the criticism of them seems wrong-headed? Can I say often enough that Mike Arrington just rubs me the wrong way? How many “libertarians” out there need to hear the message that they are thoughtless, greedy people who are operating in a delusional context? How many other adjectives can I throw at them before I go over the top?
How can a guy make any money in this sphere by insulting the money people? How can a guy keep his self respect if he doesn’t insult most of them at one time or another?
How many of us are reading each other any more anyway?
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