Cafe Bucky

Jason Kottke has decided to quit his day job and blog full-time. He won’t be accepting ads, and will derive his income from micro-patronage.

I hope it works for him! There are only so many artists, performers, creators that can make a go of doing what they love full time. I think my writing would warrant a Mocha (hmm, perhaps just a single) every other week month or so. (but while y’all are holding off, I’ll keep buying my own :-)

I don’t know Jason personally (I see him at Apple SoHo, or ETCon), but my impression is that he’s at a good stage of life to do the all-out risk-taking thing. Perhaps it’s not so much of a risk. He knows he has tons of readers, and 7200-odd links from Google to his site. I’d wager that he has a good chance.

The last bit here is: will it change how he writes? It’s one thing to write for fun. Will it be any different when others are giving bucks? Is there the temptation to steer words towards what the patrons might want to read? Does it make the difference between cooking at home versus grabbing a slice and a beer? I think this is the most interesting part of the experiment: can you get paid to be yourself, or do you change yourself to get paid?

Go for it, Jason. Break a leg!

Date: Thursday, February 24th, 2005 at 7:27 am | Category: Ideas, Society, Tech | RSS Feed: RSS 2.0 feed.

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