The Brazillians are going to win the World Cup

You can say I’m crazy, or disregarding Holland, or any old thing you like. Brazil looks like a team that’s just going to let quality and patience win them the tournament. If we’re exceptionally lucky, they’ll play Argentina in the Finals and Diego Maradona will turn into an anime version of himself in his halftime talk. Messi and co. will return to the pitch, looking slightly bemused and mostly embarrased, as a 3D-rendered Diego marches alongside them, a tiny emoticon floating above his head. What it is, no one knows – it changes too quickly for anyone to draw a bead on its actual meaning.

And then Brazil will beat them. Much has been made of defense in this tournament (or if it hasn’t, it ought to have done). Brazil has it in spades, but it’s the kind of defense that rampages up the right hand side and scores from impossible angles. That, my friends, is value added.

Most ridiculous press report: Mourinho thinks Ronaldo’s an Okay Player Still

“Hey, Jimmy, there’s this gap between the conclusion of the second round and the start of the quarterfinals. Go ask Jose if he thinks Ronaldo will be crap this year at Real Madrid based on his perennially tepid World Cup performance.”

“But, boss, doesn’t that border on dumbest question ever?”

“I don’t care if it’s the result of an all-night peyote bender with a radical sect of octagenarian free thinkers! And, by the way, it’s exactly that.”

“…”

“We have no scores to report, kid! The headline will say Mourinho, that’s all I need!”

The Flaming Roses make their debut

Just as soon as I get it edited up I’m going to post a clip from the first Rock and Roll Camp for Girls Showcase of the summer. Why you ask? Because it was awesome. And it involved my daughter. So there.

I need to write more

So hey, here’s the thing. A lot of people have asked me about the new job. A lot of people have asked me about Sponsored Tweets. Many other people have just generally commented that they like it when I use my words. That’s all been lovely and (in the case of the last one) flattering, and so I’m going to try to get better at posting on this blog thing. It’s hard for me to make fun of Dietrich turning his blog into Firefox Performance infoporn if I, myself, am not writing.

So there’s the promise of sorts. Famous last words and all that.

No one is going to bang the drum louder for valuing content than the people who create it, but there’s a whole complex of reasons why writers don’t get paid magazine rates for blog posts, website copy, etc. Not to be too much of a Debbie Downer, but here (among other things) are the barriers I can come up with off the top of my head:

Content is free

The expectation, however unfair, is that information is free on the web. From community-based, public service models like Wikipedia (which we should applaud) to the neverending pile of nonsense from prnewswire-style services (which we should not applaud), there’s just a lot of stuff on the web. If I want to go read about something that happened, check into the blogosphere’s opinion on X, or otherwise learn about things, I can – and odds are good I will never even be asked to subscribe. Salon.com and NYT are two information services that are making an effort at a subscription model, but you have to have an incredibly potent brand to make that work. Or be a niche (I’m looking at you, Star City Games).

There have been many debates regarding the “get what you pay for” versus “guerilla marketing writ large” aspects of free content. People who, to whatever extent, are trying to build a brand that can support an ad model/tip jar/”hire me ’cause I’m smart” are firmly on the side of content being free. So why/how are you going to pay people if the enterprise is not in the black? Particularly if you’re not charging people to read the stuff?

Ad space is infinite

Magazines don’t actually make money on subscriptions either (hence the “super discount” insert card in every single magazine ever). They make money selling soap, or gadgets, or hearbreaking works of staggering genius. They want readership so they can price the ads higher, so they pretty much give the magazine away in terms of realizing a profit. In that sense, content is also (close to) free in magazines as well – at least to the extent that the sale price does not compensate the author of a given bit of content. It’s the ads.

In a magazine, ads cost a fixed amount and there are fixed number of places available to advertise. Limited real estate = much more responsive supply and demand cycle. You want Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter on a full page in People? Okey dokey – that will be a zillion dollars. On the web, ads may cost a fixed amount, but that amount is much smaller because the inventory is limitless – just slap up another page (article, blog post, camera review) et voila – ad space.

And what’s it worth? Who’s gonna see it? Is it a Person of Note writing? Will they care enough? Can you get CPM (probably not unless you’re awesome) or is there going to be some sort of conversion model? What sort of money are you getting off your RSS ads (if you’re doing that)? In short, will the advertising around a given chunk of content get you to $0.10/word or $25 total? If the answer is yes, please email me your next call for submissions.

There’s no precedent model for participatory media

This is a fancy way of saying that “blogging isn’t journalism” or “blogging isn’t academe.” There’s a “marketplace of ideas,” for sure, but we know more about the economies of entirely made up places than we do about the economics of “real world” online content. So the open question becomes: what’s it worth to you? Is a given post or series of posts worth as much or more, for example, than a “One Minute Manager” book? This is why webcomics have followed the old skool comic model of assembling chunks of strips into books – what once was free is now available in handy archive form. The sad truth for many blogs, however, is that no one’s going to buy the book about your blog unless you’re Wil Wheaton or summat. Which brings me to the next point:

“High School to NBA” happens once a year at best

Either you wrote a book and now have a companion web presence, or you became a superfamous webizen and now you get to write books and speak and whatnot. Both are extremely rare (at least at the traffic levels that I would describe as the “big leagues”). The long tail is a harsh mistress.

We will work for free

This post is an example. Over at Extreme Arts & Sciences, I get “paid” to blog only to the extent that I get paid to maintain all of the webby stuff going on. We write about stuff we care about because we care about it. It’s not really expected that we’ll find a way to riches. The syndicated routes to such riches are so gross and inauthentic and MLM-laden that I just plain cannot endorse them. At all. I’d rather write when it matters to me, pursue projects, etc.

Gosh, I sound like a Portland Creative, don’t I? Gotta stop hanging around you people…

The format follows the name of the coffee shop – 3 readers/performers. We’re each going to have (roughly) 15-17 minutes of stage time. The theme is found poetics within boilerplate or legislative gobbledygook – so the idea is not merely to read the worst legal document you’ve ever had the pleasure of receiving (although that would be fine), but to mash up, surrealize further, or otherwise play with legal language in a fashion that begs to be spoken aloud.

I’d like to see two folks with musical or other talents, so that we don’t have a full hour of reading. Even at the best of times, that can be trying. And of course, if your shtick is not exactly what I’m describing (how could it be) but you feel that there are synergies, also feel free to leave a comment or @ me on Twitter or email me or whatever. Myself, I’m going to be working on an epic poem of sorts to read for my piece.

It would be good to see friends and tweeps take some open mic time as well, themed or no…

When you read a programming manual, For Dummies or not, it typically states a set of design principles. Among these is the notion that code should flow cleanly, be organized, and to the extent that it is possible, tell the story of what’s going to happen if I compile the program. A contract is fundamentally no different, except the machine you’re compiling the program on is usually a court of law, regulatory schema, or (often) another body of code, like a default statutory scheme. The contract receives inputs and outputs results according to the scheme.

Obviously, the impact of a bug in a contract can have just as large a set of ramifications for everyone involved – you’re asking the courts to provide tech support. Not a good plan. And, just like programming languages, legalese can produce, promote, and sustain fictions (see, for example, Enron). The more creative the mind behind the code, the bigger the lie you can perpetuate. In programming, that equals awesome game experience. In law, often not as cool. On the other hand, the same capacity to exist in PretendTown allows you to duck some of the more egregious chunks of the American legal system. Creative Commons is, after all, nothing more than contracting around copyright law.

I think the metaphor has legs and want to try to document some examples as the year unfolds. If you’re a coder and want to contribute some particularly “narrative” code, I’ll try to come up with a complementary example in the world of legal drafting. In the meantime, let us all keep our code (and hands) squeaky clean.

I’m also nowhere near done with the book. I’d estimate that I’ll have at least half again as many words before I reach the end. But what’s been so amazing about this process is the regularity of insisting upon owning the unproductive hours. I mean, sure, I’m totally behind on my game-playing, and I miss me some Frisky Dingo, but the practical effect on my schedule has been close to nil, and plus I’m writing a book.

I suspect that this subject may emerge as an Ignite Portland topic. Ignite V happens three days before my birthday, which means that they owe me. Not really, but I do think I’m going to talk about nanowrimo and what to do after you write the book.