Loose Links (Wednesday)
¶ The big news is that Jason Kottke has quit his day job to run kottke.org full time; to support himself, he is soliciting ‘micropatronage.’ Mr Kottke, a physics major from Coe ('95), has been publishing online for ten years, and for seven at his current site. (Ten years ago, I wasn’t even doing much email; it wouldn’t be until the summer of ’96 that I'd join a listserv and began spending a portion of each day on line.) I don’t know where full-time blogging will take him, but I became a supporter immediately – see the little button at the lower left. To give you an idea of how clever Mr Kottke is, let me tell you that his roster of micropatrons is randomly regenerated each time the page is reloaded, so that where you appear on the list means nothing; you can't boast to your friends that you were among the first ten contributors and expect the list to back you up.
I dream of supporting my sites with contributions - "patronage" and "subscriptions" are closer to what I'm looking for than "donations" - far smaller than the ones that Mr Kottke is soliciting (he suggests $30, or $2.50 per month; I make one-time donations to sites that I like at least once a month, $10 usually, and I have never received a dime from anybody), but for that to work I’ll have to have lots more readers. While I’m gathering them, it’s oddly comforting to know that it has taken ten years for kottke.org to attract its huge following, especially given that most of its readership was pre-sold (prepared, that is, to look to new technology for information about new technology). I’m at the other end of the spectrum; very few of the readers I'm writing for even think of finding satisfaction on the Web. I have to hope that that will change, and in fact I have to believe that I will be instrumental in bringing the change about. So the big news about Jason Kottke is also big news, if only in my apartment, about me.
¶ The good news is that Édouard has revived Sale Bête. He wasn't gone for very long - not quite two weeks - but his absence left a real hole. He was coy about retiring, and equally coy about returning; he launched his re-entry in parenthesis, even:
(Désolé, c’est plus fort que moi. En plus, j’suis en vacances pour quelques jours — donc, j’ai du temps à perdre.)
But his readers posted enough comments, first of sorrow and desolation, then of delight and gratitude, to make his importance crystal clear. I remember that someone asked, in a comment on De Bric et de Blog, if Édouard could really be permitted just to "dump us." I'm sure that Édouard never thought that he was courting celebrity resentment.
¶ An example of something that should be done more often: Jesurgislac, a writer who posts frequent comments on Obsidian Wings, did what ObWi member Sebastian Holsclaw's asked her to do. Jesurgislac had contributed several comments to a very long thread about whether Eason Jordan's remarks about GIs targeting journalists had any factual support. Mr Holsclaw asked her to organize them into a coherent post on her own site, and this she has done. There are jewels in many comment threads, and they should be sifted when the dust settles. Next time, Jesurgislac, don't wait to be asked.
