The Gandhi Memorial at Mass Ave and Q St NW. Light dusting, getting heavier.
Berries in a snow-covered bush.
DC Union Station in the snowy haze.
how now brownpau
The Gandhi Memorial at Mass Ave and Q St NW. Light dusting, getting heavier.
Berries in a snow-covered bush.
DC Union Station in the snowy haze.
A couple of days ago, seminal blogger and web artist Jason Kottke announced that he was turning his website into his full-time livelihood, paid for by the distributed support of “micropatrons.” Not “donations” or a “subscription fee,” mind you — he’s still making his weblog publicly accessible to all, and there isn’t a “tip jar” — but regular “patronship.” He even makes parallels to the Medicis and the MacArthur Foundation.
Of course, my first thought was that this was just flowery framing around a plea for donations to subsidize a popular unemployed “A-Lister’s” self-ordained celebrity status, to say nothing of the conceit of comparing oneself to a Medici beneficiary. But then, considering that other writers, artists, and even webloggers, are able to make a decent living off their work, I’m sure that Kottke, being widely read and reasonably creative, can muster up enough goodwill for enough donations to slog through his first “pro” year. If he can get enough micropatrons to be true to their annual pledges, he might even last longer than that without having to resort to other gigs too often.
Still, to go all the way with this “patronage” idea, consider that artists are patronized and comissioned by rich donors to make works with specific subjects. If Kottke really wants to go the “independent web artist” route, I suggest he go back to his creative roots and immediately revive the work which made him famous before blogs made him famous: 0sil8. Then, start getting serious: don’t just ask for money on your weblog, but start writing grant proposals to actual endowments.
What I’m wondering is this: weblogs are about our lives, but when one makes his weblog his life, what’ll it be about? Cultural and political commentary along with occasional photo albums? A dull blog? Or will it turn into a psychic resonance feedback loop like John Malkovich encountered in Being John Malkovich when he entered his own tunnel?
I was also wondering about tax itemizations, but that’s addressed in Kottke’s interview with Greg Storey.
More in this hilarious MeFi thread.
Update: MicroMedici. Brad has more on modern Medicism, link found via Anil. Angie McKaig expounds on what bothers her about Kottke’s style of micropatronage, and compares it with patronage of museums and art.
Key quote from Anil: “I believe in the idea of everyone being a Medici, except without the nasty Medici habit of infiltrating the papacy.” Wait, what’s wrong with weblog authors and their patrons becoming Pope? That would be soooo cool. If I were Pope, think of the sweeping anti-Trent evangelical reforms I would institute as fast as I could, before the Cardinals came to stab me! But that’s fodder for another post.
Since webcams seem to be coming back into fashion, as seen over at Kottke’s and Haughey’s, I figured I might as well revive mine. To replace the old lost Fire-I (a tragic loss, that; I’m coming to realize now just what a great webcam it was), I got a relatively cheap Logitech Quickcam. It’s nothing great: decent image quality, slightly buggy with Evocam, but enough to satisfy anyone with a voyeuristic interest in watching my face move around while I work.
The cam. Enjoy. I leave it running at home in the mornings just so I can keep an eye on the cat.
Not strictly referrer spam just yet, but someone with an IP in China just clicked through to my site from the location H:/2005 key words/hat/hatimports.htm. Sounds like someone’s getting his linkfarm ready. (“Linkfarms” are those huge sites full of lists of links, usually auto-generated from search results, there to attract search engine bots and give the illusion of legitimate content.)
Thanks to their uninhibited abuse of the web, Reffy, like Adminshop, now has a pagerank of zero, as evidenced by these search results. Google now has a Spam Report Form for you to notify them of similar violators.
Preemptive strike against referrer spammer. I noticed this spammer in my logs yesterday, but the domain was still unregistered — an occasional strategy among spammers wishing to confuse reverse-DNS lookups. Well, it looks like someone else bought jagk.com before the spammer could, and turned it into an antispam resource. Domain “stolen?” Well, I wouldn’t call it stealing, really; the guy bought it fair and square. I wonder how much a domain like that would fetch on eBay! ;)
Today’s 022005 entry is called “Presidents,” a triptych of various leaders’ morphed faces. I especially enjoyed making the first one, in which I blended Gilbert Stuart’s portraits of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson into a single man, whom I have dubbed Über-President. A Happy President’s Day to you.
Another brave little squirrel comes right up to the lens, on the grassy field near the Peace Monument, the US Capitol, and Pennsylvania and Constitution Avenue. In the background is the monolithic Department of Labor building. And another squirrel.
Photo taken with a Canon Powershot A400.
Also see Supreme Court Attack Squirrel, Judiciary Squirrel, National Mall Bench Squirrel, Tenacious Smithsonian Squirrel, and various other squirrels I have encountered.
An anniversary reminder from Anil Dash: it has been four years since Zeldman said “To Hell With Bad Browsers.” It was around then that we got to know the @import
hack, started to shun Netscape 4 with div.ahem { display: none }
“browser upgrade initiative” messages, and slowly began turning the <tables>
* on bad web markup practices.
And today, four years later, we’re thinking of IE5.x the way we thought of Netscape 4 back then; sites like ABCNews and Orbitz and McAfee and of all things, MSN, sport XHTML pages with CSS layouts; and Mozilla not only came into being, but reached and passed v1.0, was downloaded millions of times, and is even beginning to threaten IE’s browser supremacy. Who’d have thunk it?
The face of the web was changed in four years, thanks to Jeffrey, ALA, and the WaSP. It’s like a graduation with flying colors.
Here’s how the Web Archive remembers it, albeit without CSS.
* WHAT A CLEVER PUN THAT WAS. WASN’T IT CLEVER?
Please, sweat the small stuff. Cameron Moll has some good advice for Photoshop artists on the use of Unsharp Mask to compensate for the problems of interpolation in resized images. It’s such a basic thing, yet I’ve been overlooking that step for years.
Two things immediately spring to mind: Poochie and TNIV.
They’re also talking about it on Metafilter.
I feel that I must apologize, somewhat, for the increase in advertising on various pages here on my site. My rationalization is that it helps serve the hundreds who come to my site via Google searches everyday and want more than just my journal entries: sometimes, the content-driven ads actually have answers for them. Right? Right?
Oh fine, it’s the money.
Speaking of which, remember how I mentioned that content on “mesothelioma” and “asbestos” generated the top-earning clicks in text-based advertising? Well, Michael Buffington (of Stinkfactor Challenges fame, though sadly the domain was allowed to expire) has started a profit-driven asbestos weblog, exclusively about asbestos issues and that little Google Ads box in the corner. And why not? As Mkelley said when he started Applesque, “Where else but on the web can you start a business idea with $0?” *
The Ferengi would be proud.
* It must be pointed out, however, that the $0 doesn’t cover the cost of domain registration and web hosting.