Anyway after days of work and some expense I tracked the beast to its lair, but in the process of restoring the posts, a lot of question marks replaced various bits of punctuation. Dispiriting.  Sorry to those of you who read older entries, but I can’t face the job of fixing those right now.

A meaningful Easter to those of you who have them, and for the others, this piece of chocolate-based theology.

Garrison Keillor nailed it. Writers don’t want to mumble ‘Glad you enjoyed the book’. They want to say ‘Rise, my grateful people.’

Nothing wrong with making money. I just wish people would be more straightforward about it.

Consider the case of Nathan Rice, a prominent WordPress guru and theme designer. His conscience has been troubling him, he explains, because his work rests on a free platform, WordPress, whereas his themes are for sale. In his view the freebies out there aren’t up to much. (I wonder if his disdain extends to Cutline, or Tarski, the minimalist designs at plaintxt or indeed Oulipo.)

Anyway, Nathan felt he wanted to give away a really first-rate theme.

An Innovative Business Model

Ever since I first conceived the idea, I?ve wanted to toy with the idea of a ?freemium? model theme release site. I wanted to figure out a way to give away free themes, yet build a sustainable income from the site as well. In my opinion, unless an idea can indirectly monetize, eventually the project leader will burnout.

Elevate will be monetized in three ways:

1. Premium Membership
2. Theme Sponsorship
3. Community Job Openings

From my experience in other domains, Nathan is dead right about burn-out. But, y’know, ‘freemium‘?

If you give somebody a gift, that person will feel a small but distinct obligation to reciprocate. AVG, for example, gives away its very effective anti-virus program. Are they mad? Are they philanthropists? Or do they count on enough people upgrading to their paid version? Play ‘Find the Freebie’ on their website.

Terms like ‘monetise’ (or ‘social capital’) are small signs of the seemingly endless effects of Carlyle’s ‘cash nexus’. Looking back on the feudal era, he wrote: ‘Cash Payment had not then grown to be the universal sole nexus of man to man.’ (‘Chartism’ 1839) Looking back from here, we’re inclined to say the same of Carlyle’s own period.

Anyway, Nathan, all the best. Looks like an appealing theme, with sufficient complexity under the hood to guarantee that those who use it will pretty soon be paying for support. Sort of like Windows and DOS – and look at him today.

I?ve been reading entirely too many blogs lately. When you take that initial step into this blogging thing, you never realize how much time it takes to actually get some people to read the crap you dare to write.

Go Kim.

The word “blog” is a portmanteau term for Web log or Weblog. In 1997 Jorn Barger, the keeper of Robot Wisdom, a Web site full of writings about James Joyce, artificial intelligence, and Judaism as racism (he’s reputedly a racist himself), coined the word “Weblog.” In 1999 Peter Merholz, the author of a Weblog called Peterme, split it in two like this?”We blog”?creating a word that could serve as either noun or verb. “Blog” was born.

Sarah Boxer in The New York Review of Books

The excellent Andrea Mignolo , deviser of the Oulipo theme, is blameless. It’s other people’s themes leaving small black holes in the database. Friends, I have been to the database and looked upon it and returned.

Quello che non mi uccide mi fortifica – it sounds almost sensible in Italian.