dive into mark

Dorothea Salo: Blogging for dollars. While I don’t hold myself up as a paragon of integrity (I think some important nuances of last fall’s festivities got lost over time), I do agree with Dorothea that the current blogging for dollars meme is hilariously misguided. It reminds me of the business plan from South Park (thanks Aaron), which people on Slashdot seem to adapt to every situation, and which is easily adaptable to this one:

1. Wile away the best years of your life building a weblog and filling it with useful, interesting, relevant, topical, engaging content every day.
2. ???
3. Profit!

Speaking of which, everyone should go read Algorhythm, which I designed (and got paid for). Shawn liked my weblog, like my accessibility series, and wanted a pure-CSS, accessible weblog template that he could easily maintain himself.

There’s money to be made from blogging, but indirectly — getting leads for paying gigs (Algorhythm), expanding your professional skill set (Dive Into Python), and finding entirely new opportunities through networking (Building Accessible Websites). But direct sponsorship? Dorothea nails it: sponsorship of content inevitably ends in tears, because it requires the content producer to be incorruptible.

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