Blogging prospects looking up
"One swallow doesn't make a summer," folk wisdom warns us, but this being winter we'll have to think of a more appropriate proverb. Appropriate, that is, to describe the growing evidence that blogging is beginning to show commercial promise. First came Andrew Sullivan's one-week contributions drive in December that reaped an impressive $79,020 from 3,339 people. That'll pay his salary and that of an intern/assistant. Then came word that John Scalzi got a book contract because of the blog serialization of Old Man's War. It's actually a two-book deal. As Scalzi wrote:
"For talented and committed writers, writing on one's own site is a true alternative medium which can be used for one's overall gain, and not simply as a catchall for otherwise unusable or unpublishable material. People who write well, and write online, no longer need to feel at an inherent disadvantage to those who write well, and write in a traditional medium (bad writers, alas for them, are still stuck)."
And here's more growth news from the blogosphere. Nick Denton is looking for a writer for a new blog covering things quirky and erotic. Subject matter: retro porn, computer-generated imagery, erotic art, slash fiction, Hobbit sex. The job, in Denton's words, will be a "labor of love, um, lust." E-mail porno@nickdenton.org. Meanwhile, over at NY Craig's List they're looking to hire a hardware/software engineer for a blog project to do with news indexing. Deadline is 11 January.
Still more good news! Rainy Day expects to show a small profit by the end of 2003.
Diarist of the day: Malcolm Muggeridge, 7 January 1936"Brian Lunn took me to lunch in the Inner Temple. It was like being back at Cambridge. I found him in a little wooden room, reading old divorce briefs. They were pencilled over with comment. The language was not at all bowdlerized. One contained a verbatim report of a telephone conversation a husband had overheard between his wife and her lover. He claimed that it proved adultery because, in this conversation, she used the same pet name for penis as with him."
