Regular programming will resume shortly
If you’ve cared to notice, blogging has been slow around these parts of the internets. I would posit that an upcoming product release and its concomitant increase in workload are to be blamed. Or thanked.
That theory has a competitor though. An alternative theory suggests that the lack of interesting (read blog-worthy) events in YT’s life could explain the lack of updates.
The analytically gifted readers would’ve noticed that Theory 1 and Theory 2 could be correlated. I’ll leave the calculation of the covariance for some other day.
I’ve been asked - offline - why I haven’t blogged recently. Twice! Well, stranger things have happened.
So what should I write about? I’ve got two short micro stories in draft. Yeah, I know. Even my micro-fiction lives in draft form. Pathetic! Anyway, can’t post them here to end the drought because… they are still drafts.
Speaking of stories, here’s an idea I want to throw out there and see if anyone’s interested: Realtime Mashup Fiction. Here’s how it works. To get started, we need three or four literate human beings and a collaborative writing tool such as Writely. The participants draw up a rough plot and write down a very barebones plot outline. Then they start writing the story, simultaneously - on the same page. They can see what others are writing, where they are going with the plot, how they are fleshing out the characters and then they can adjust their own writing according to that. Or not! They could even go and make some changes to what someone else has written! What say? Anyone wants to try it out?
BTW, I’ve had this collab-writing idea in mind for some time now. I think I’ve even discussed it with someone - I don’t recall who. :-(
Poor recall is my Achilles heel, IIRC.
Kaps has been blogging about the earning potential of blogs recently. Check posts here and here. I share his view that for the vast majority of bloggers out there, the earning potential is limited. Take my blog for instance. It has been around for a couple of years now. It enjoys good search engine rankings for a few keywords. There’s a group of regular readers - Feedburner says 50 subscribers of which at least half should be human^ by my estimate. And it averages about 170 visitors a day. All in all, this is your typical long tail blog by a long tail writer creating long tail content.
I’ve been running Google AdSense advts on this blog since December 2005. What are my earnings to date? US$14.64
That doesn’t even cover my hosting costs! Clearly, living on blogging isn’t for the masses. I am going to run ads until December. If they can pay at least 30% of my hosting bill, I’ll keep them around. Else, advertisement free Sounds from the Dungeon for all in 2007!!
Update: Forgot to write about this last night: at Borland Singapore, we are looking for a Java geek, preferably with some C++ experience too. Drop me a line and I’ll mail you the job profile.
^ What would be a good way to find out the human/bot ratio? Asking all subscribers to write a comment would be one way, I suppose. ;-)