Baffled as to why there hasn't been more blogging this month

There hasn't been nearly enough blogging in October and I'm ready to make excuses.

1) October is my least favorite month and everything always goes wrong!

2) I've been exhausted by my twittering!

3) I've been reading things that make me reconsider my blogging efforts!


I'm just digging into the reborn Baffler. Astra Taylor's piece, "Serfing the Net," sticks out especially for its up-to-the-moment relevance to blogging. She makes great points about corporations that pirating from the pirates (like Nike appropriating designs first seen on bootleg shoes). She claims that Google doesn't really want to digitize every book in the world because they're a bunch of socialists--they want that almost infinite number of pages for targeted advertising.

Taylor talks about a future where gathering online followers is the only way for an artist to survive (because of the ad revenue their hits could generate). As even Free! author Chris Anderson is forced to admit, "Free can't yet compare to Paid." And this, from the triumphant climax of "Serfing the Net":

There's a dignity, a right livelihood if you will, that comes from supporting oneself through creative work undertaken with integrity. Yes, artists will work for love, not money. There are many occupations where that is case. But the idea of building a massively profitable industry on the uncompensated labor of say, teachers, would strike most as loathsome, not daring and innovative.

So I guess you can look forward to lots of Google ads in this space, as I look to put the "fee" in "free." I hope it doesn't put off my robust readership!