This commentary from Jason Kottke regarding his site: “I don’t have categories, keywords, or other metadata for posts and the search mechanism is not optimized for weblog use (it searches by page, weblogs need search results returned on a post-basis). My site isn’t smart…it doesn’t make connections between current posts and older posts (either on my site or elsewhere) like it should (and like Google and Amazon do with their content). I can’t even display single posts on their own page. It’s pretty pathetic. None of the tools out there offer exactly what I want. Movable Type does categories, but specifying multiple categories per post is a bit of a pain…and there’s no search or room for other types of metadata.”
Sorry Jason, but I hate to break it to you… MovableType does all of those things for me and more. You can search thanks to Jay. You can link to individual posts. You can leave comments. You can view by category. It’s all a matter of taking the time to use the software. But you can have all that you wish for and more…
I was lead to that post of Jason’s from this post on “The Weblog Foundation”. Which leads to an interesting concept – do you blog for profit? I don’t – I blog for me. Thanks to that search feature, it’s a great way for me to find things I have linked to so it’s a wonderful resource to me. Like I said, it’s just a matter of how you use it. So – what about you?
(Edited: You can follow the MeFi thread on this here if you are interested. I found it quite amusing. Thanks to wKen for mentioning it!)
9 replies on “Have to Disagree with You…”
blog for profit? you mean, there’s people out there who might pay to read my drivel? nahhh. what does a blog for profit look like? i wanna see, now…
There are very few that I would pay to read. Slate? Nah, I don’t pay to read that stuff. And what leads me to really like a blog most of the time is when it’s written from the heart (although there are a few “just the fact” ones that I enjoy.) When money becomes involved then it seems that that “spirit” is broken sometimes.
Profit? What’s that? 😉
why do people always find the need to commercialize everything? I so don’t get it. Now maybe if Brad Pitt was blogging and showing a bit of himself on the ol webcam I might be inclined to *pay* a few dollars to see it 🙂 but can’t say I’d pay to hit the blogging scene or even visit ones that resorted to the popups/banners etc.
I noticed on the Metafilter thread about this subject that one blogger claimed to being paid $9K a month to maintain his blog by some investors. Evidently he is a published author, though I didn’t recognize him. He complained that it is alot of work to make regular posts, and that it doesn’t pay as well as his article writing and book sales.
I understand his point, but obviously most people don’t need money to motivate them to express themselves online.
i don’t need money to motivate me. i just blog. (“just blog it”–here i sound like a nike commercial. perhaps nike can be my blogging “underwriter”. ha ha.)
i agree with gnome-girl: why does everything have to be commercialised? “We need to demontrate their value to the Web, to media, to advertisers, and to society. We need to bring business discipline to the world of weblogging..” pushaaaaaa. this is not a need. it’s the desire of some crack-pipe lunatic.
blogging sprang up out of nothing, and should continue in nothing. look what happened to rock n’ roll: the music evolved from a mixture of human heart and emotion, then met commercialism. now we have Britney Spears.
This is all just part of the “15 minutes of fame” spotlight that Andrew Sullivan and the warblog crowd are getting. I don’t think too many of us ever have to be worried about what to do with all the money publishers throw at us for our blogs. The media have a very short attention span and will be hailing some other “revolutionary” thing any day now.
A foundation like this would take away the spontaneity. Ironically, then the best blogs who are awarded some money would just become part of the establishment themselves.
There is also the danger that it may become an MLM like scheme – although the original proposer did not mean that of course. Lots of people would throw in some money and some would walk away with lots of money.
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I should have made my point a little clearer. There is some stuff I didn’t mention that MT doesn’t do that I would like in a weblog tool. The Vanilla app I linked to in that post comes closer, but it’s still not quite right.