Good stuff (of the digital kind)
Two questions I get asked occasionally are:
- Do I get paid to write nice things about software?
- Why don’t I write more about things I DON’T like?
1. No. The only one who pays for my blog is BlogHer – which is the ads you see – and they don’t seem to care what I write as long as people read it. The checks from them pretty much cover my Chardonnay bill. Incidentally, they pay WAY better than Google AdSense.
2. My original reason for writing this blog was to remind myself of stuff. Ever see that comic where the kid raises his hand and asks the teacher
“May I be excused from class? My brain is full.”
Well, my brain is like that a lot. At any given time I may go from javascript to jquery, impact.js, SAS, PHP, SQL to giving a lecture on logistic regression. I forget stuff. That terrific site, really cool application, a function that allowed me to do exactly what I wanted, so I write it down here to remember the next time I need to know something like that.
Here is a fact: A lot of stuff sucks.
There are over 1,000,000 books on Amazon. It’s a lot more productive to write about a book I read that was good than the 867,345 books on Amazon that are mediocre or worse. You’ll find something good much faster by looking for stuff that’s good than ruling out everything that sucks.
Whether you’re talking about a mobile app, a new suite of software or added functions or formats, there will be a lot that are boring, useless or just plain suck. It just seems really inefficient to waste my time writing about them unless the rise to a truly notable level of suckiness – and most things don’t, they don’t even excel at sucking and will fade out of the general consciousness, sinking under the weight of their own mediocrity.
I honestly don’t understand people who spend a lot of time writing about the stuff they DON’T like.