Bribing Bloggers
Bribing Bloggers
Joel raised a thorny issue in accepting gifts in his essay, Bribing Bloggers. Don't accept gifts because they only cause problems. Well what does he do next? Gets another book and writes about it.
Suggestions
Sell, auction the book with a personal note inside & donate the proceedes to charity. The trick, don't mention the title, author or publisher. Return the book to sender 'out the publishers' who try to bribe bloggers & shame them.
These might seem to be harsh, stupid or irrational but there is a purpose. You see we (I do) use Joels articles as a form of BS detection to what is good, not so good and evil. Publishers are trying any way to to subvert this process.
Alpha Geeks
Tim O'Reilly identified this idea in his 'Watching the "Alpha Geeks"' and it looks like the other publishers are just subverting this idea to make a buck. It goes something like this. If you can find the uber programmer, hacker types the other mortals will copy, imatate and hopefully buy.
Solution
So what should you do? Joels a pretty ethical guy but he seems stuck in his need to create geeky blog material and the publishers that want to subvert the system. Take *Dave Winers'* & *Craig Newmarks`* approach (don't know about the no fee bit though) ,
* NO advertising
* NO freebies like hardware, software or books
* NO interviews
Let the writing and more importantly the ideas stand on their own two feet. The choice is stark. Now I don't know if Joels articles are bought or fair dinkum.
Conclusions
So what can we learn from this? Is Joel going evil on us?
No.
The evidence does not support this. (though I wonder about this & this and this google advertising with programming ads) JOS is one of the better sites covering business and is far better, way better than any news organisation in presenting useful information about startups, software and development.
What JOS lacks I think is the wisdom of Winer or Newmarks who see the downside of being subverted and realise that blogs and information don't have to be sold for dollar value to make a difference to a product or service.
Bribing Bloggers
Bribing Bloggers
Joel raised a thorny issue in accepting gifts in his essay, Bribing Bloggers. Don't accept gifts because they only cause problems. Well what does he do next? Gets another book and writes about it.
Suggestions
Sell, auction the book with a personal note inside & donate the proceedes to charity. The trick, don't mention the title, author or publisher. Return the book to sender 'out the publishers' who try to bribe bloggers & shame them.
These might seem to be harsh, stupid or irrational but there is a purpose. You see we (I do) use Joels articles as a form of BS detection to what is good, not so good and evil. Publishers are trying any way to to subvert this process.
Alpha Geeks
Tim O'Reilly identified this idea in his 'Watching the "Alpha Geeks"' and it looks like the other publishers are just subverting this idea to make a buck. It goes something like this. If you can find the uber programmer, hacker types the other mortals will copy, imatate and hopefully buy.
Solution
So what should you do? Joels a pretty ethical guy but he seems stuck in his need to create geeky blog material and the publishers that want to subvert the system. Take *Dave Winers'* & *Craig Newmarks`* approach (don't know about the no fee bit though) ,
* NO advertising
* NO freebies like hardware, software or books
* NO interviews
Let the writing and more importantly the ideas stand on their own two feet. The choice is stark. Now I don't know if Joels articles are bought or fair dinkum.
Conclusions
So what can we learn from this? Is Joel going evil on us?
No.
The evidence does not support this. (though I wonder about this & this and this google advertising with programming ads) JOS is one of the better sites covering business and is far better, way better than any news organisation in presenting useful information about startups, software and development.
What JOS lacks I think is the wisdom of Winer or Newmarks who see the downside of being subverted and realise that blogs and information don't have to be sold for dollar value to make a difference to a product or service.