(Note to self: People can’t read articles if you don’t get around to posting them)
So, O’Reilly is selling screen-estate and pagerank and Phil thinks this is Bad, because they are a Global Megacorperation And Should Be Making Money From Books Not Pagerank, Damnit.
Shelley, who also is also selling Screen Estate for PageRank is looking for a way to monetize the high regard her writing and output is held in so that she can pay the bills. High regard is not, you’ll note, something that banks take.
Me? I’m not held in high regard by the blogosphere, in general. Most of those who know of this little outpost do so because of the ESF debarcle, and the amount of respect and high regard that gains me is barely worth three lack of oranges. (Repect is measured in lack of oranges. If you have not enough lack of oranges, people don’t respect you enough not to assassinate you).
In fact, one of the few things on a global level that respects and admires all the fine work I do for the Internet is GoogleBot. GoogleBot loves me, even if nobody else does. GoogleBot loves me so much that within a week of working for my current employers – who are a web development agency with the same name as a number of other web development agencies around the world – I was third match for a search of their name. Much to their irritation. When Broken Sword 3 was released, a thousand gamers complained that it was broken and needed a patch. Number one match for ‘Broken Sword 3 Patch’? Me.
Likewise “Frowny Light bulb” and a host of others.
And this is cool. Admittedly, I’d prefer to be famous for, say, web development, writing, voice work, not liking Marmite; but the fact that I’m apparently an authority on something is, you know, cool.
And so, I feel a sense of duty to deserve this ranking. Not because Google owe me anything (Though my first AdSense cheque arrived almost exactly a year after I started running Google ads on anything over three months old), but because the web as a whole works best when all the people are working for, rather than against the technology.