December 04, 2007

State of the Blogs Roundup: Ronni, Brian, Shelley, Tony, Doc, and Extra-Jesus

I'm concerned about the state of blogging, located just south of North Dakota and just north of South Carolina last time I looked. If you don't see it on google maps that's because the location is v. stealth.

I am concerned that the talented, smart, mouthy voices we need are growing ever wearier of the stupidity. I am concerned that vegetarianism has rendered some bloggers seemingly impotent and obviously NO one has sent meat.

I am concerned that a gender-rigged version of techmeme wouldn't link to me even if a girl did say it was okay to have such a site, which apparently she has not. Okay no i'm not really concerned about that.

I saved a kitten from drowning in a tub tonight. After a friend's three year old got out of the tub and got his PJs on, someone forgot to pull the plug on the tub. And the thing is that two 8-week-old kittens live in the house and WHAT kind of dumpster kitten jumps into a tub full of water? But when I went back in there, there he was floating about in the water looking very disheveled, and so I grabbed him out of the water, and even though this is a wild kitten, he sure was calm and happy to see me and even let me blow him dry with a noisy hair dryer.

Animals are smart like that. Especially after they do something dumb.

But the COOL thing of the day is that I learned our Shakespierce has gone and landed a holy-shit job as head blog wrangler for the entire LA Times, overseeing the MSM outlets 25 blogs. And he got BENEFRICKINFITS. Hey Mr. Media, MizPee is now in your area. Let's talk.

As for Tony's impressive new gig, I hearken back to something doc said on his old blog, doc 1.0:
It will eventually become clear to everybody that there is far more money being made because of open source than with open source. This is what we have to remember every time somebody asks, "How can you make money with (open source product)?" The answer is, "You don't make money with it. You make money because of it."

The because of principle is old hat in mature business categories, but it's new to the software business. Too many of us still want to see "business models" for all kinds of goods that don't belong on the income sides of balance sheets. Would you ask your telephone what its business model is? How about your front porch? Your driveway? Your clothes? Those things may help us make money; but they are not how we make money. Well, the same goes for open source products. They are means to ends. You make money because of them, not with them.
But the best part of that whole Doc discussion was the extra-Jesus.

Because see it was very loud at these bars when you are at SXSW, and you know bloggers, well someone used a big vocab word - Exegesis - and doc heard as "extra-Jesus", at which point that became the conversation condiment of choice for every sentence thereafter, as in "yeah, get that next pitcher with extra-Jesus blahahahaha," which you know, when you think about it, makes pretty good sense.

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