Presenter: Who likes the Beatles?

Crowd: Cheers!

Presenter: We wanted to do something special to thank you tonight. This is the most authentic ... these guys are just so authentic ... they really are the authentic experience. I give you BeatleMania Live!

Crowd: Cheers!

So Authentic.

This is the boring part.

For you, not for me. I'm spending a lot of time writing. Or thinking about writing. Or getting drunk and talking about writing. I'm covered with ideas, they spill out all over my desk and on to the floor and even as I try to write them all down so I can come back to them later, I lose more than I save.

But for you, there's nothing new to see here. Move along. It's just a stale entry that you read yesterday or the day before, or maybe the day before that.

I went out with my cousin tonight. She's a lawyer. She's got a house and a great husband and a dog. And at the end of the night she paid our tab, gave me a hug and headed home.

Our tab was nothing outrageous and I'm pretty sure for her it was an afterthought. I found myself thinking "man she's lucky, having money to spend like that."

But it's not luck. She put in the work. She did well in college and went to law school. She works hard at a job she's good at. She wasn't born a lawyer, she's just reaping the rewards of everything she's done up until this point. It has nothing to do with luck.

People tell me that I'm lucky to have a site under the Rudius banner. Or that I'm lucky have a job with Rudius Media. And if I could talk about the project I'm currently working on, people would tell me that I'm lucky to have that.

Lucky is being born with a trust fund or an eleven-inch cock. Lucky is an accident of genetics. Lucky, most of the time, is a detriment. People who are lucky rarely understand what they have until it's gone and then it's too late. Luck is bitterness waiting to happen. Luck is hubris. Luck is all the people who won the lottery only to go broke. Despite what they'll tell you on homicide shows, sometimes it's actually better to be good.

And that's why this is the boring part. Because right now I'm putting in the work and the work isn't sexy or glamorous or exciting. In fact you can't even see the work. The work is spending five hours on a four-page scene which takes minutes to read. The work is doing a ton of research so that the reader never gets pulled out of the narrative. The work is writing yet another revision, which means trashing a lot of work that came before it. Let's face it. The work sucks.

It's the payout that's cool. It's connecting with the reader and knowing that they appreciate what you've done that's sexy. But I wasn't born with a trust fund or a pornstar dick. I've got to put in the work and that means that this is going to be boring for a while.

For you though, not for me.

I've been thinking about pulling the ads off my site.

When this site went live in October I was obsessed with page views. I wanted to build stupid levels of internet crushing traffic so that advertisers would beg me to let them put their ads on my site.

I've found that traffic generally increases the more I post. So for a while there, my traffic would be high on a Monday because that's when chapters S&KS came out and then it would fall throughout the week. I could always get a bump if I posted something on this blog though.

So for a while I really considered trying to write one post a day, getting out there and networking with other bloggers, building this place to be one of the premier blogs on these here tubes. But when I started to really think about it, how to get a new post up every day I realized something important.

I don't want to be a blogger, I want to be a writer. And while it might be possible to write a post a day or every other day, there's no way I could write a short story a day or even a week. S&KS took me six months and I had been thinking about that story for years. This current thing I'm working on, I'd be surprised if when it's all said and done, it didn't take me a year of straight work. It seems that the pace of blogging and the pace of writing fiction aren't that compatible.

And while I'm sure that some people can sit down and write a blog post every day, I'm not one of them. Some days I'm too busy either with my job or with writing fiction, some days I'm too lazy and some days I just don't have anything to say. I try only write these posts when I really want to think something through and get feedback from you out there.

It's liberating to realize that and it's led me to a series of good decision. One was to release S&KS as a pdf* which was nothing more than me understanding that it didn't matter whether people were reading it on this site or if they were printing it out and reading it on the train on the way to work, the important thing is that they were reading my words.

It also probably saved the story I'm working on now. I was obsessed with having it ready to go the week S&KS was done so that my traffic wouldn't fall off. And so I overlooked some of the problems with the story in the interest of having it ready to go immediately. I kept thinking "well, it's not perfect but it's ready" which is stupid beyond belief.

Now that I'm not obsessed with my page views I've been able to slow down and start a serious rewrite that should fix the problems in the current story.

So what's all this have to do with advertising? It's easy to get caught up in that short-term "take the money now" attitude. From day one it's been my goal to really good fiction, the kind of stuff that I read and love. But if I get wrapped up in that page view / advertising dollar trap, then I undermine the whole reason I got into this in the first place.

Put another way, if you want to be a blogger then it makes sense to play that page view metric game. But if your goal is something else, then stay focused on that goal and don't get wrapped up in the short-term ups and downs.

*Download it, read it, love it, forward it to friends.

I went to a casting session for the movie today. Partly because I wanted to be able to say that I went to a casting session but mostly because I eventually want to write for both TV and film and so I'm trying to learn how all this works.

Or I thought I wanted to write for film and TV. I'm not so sure anymore. Casting is exhausting. I had thought that it would be easy, you just sit there are watch people read a scene or two. I didn't realize that you get sucked into the process. There's a real emotional investment in watching these people play out a range of emotion in front of you.

It's frustrating because the majority of what you're watching is people failing. I don't know how many people audition for each part but it's a lot. And obviously only one person is going to play that character. So for two hours or so you're watching people who don't have what it takes to play whatever character they're reading for. It's not about whether they're a good actor or actress or not. It's that you're looking for the perfect person to fill that role. I saw some very good actors / actresses who just weren't right for the parts they read.

What makes it all worth it though is when someone actually hits a role. A couple of people read today that I think* are going to be cast and watching them get it right was very, very cool. It's this "holy shit" moment when you can see the role come to life in front of you, instead of picturing it in your head.

What was even cooler though is that until now, the script was just words on a page to me. Seeing people act out the scenes really brings those words to life. For the first time, you get a real sense of how this thing is going to look when it's all put together.

And I'm not even a writer on the screenplay. I can't imagine what it's like when it's your own work.

*I don't know for sure. I was just there as a third wheel.

Suicide and Keg Stands is now available as a PDF, from the Suicide and Keg Stands Index Page. Wherein all your expectations are exceeded, your hopes are met and the chapter numbers are slightly different.

Feel free to forward it to friends, family, agents, publishers and everyone else in your address book.

Articles like this one make me smile. Maybe because I'm a bad person or maybe because I've spent my whole life hearing people tell me "OMFGBBQ without a college degree you're going to be broke and homeless."

I am a full-time Ph. D. student, in my very late thirties. I am presently very underemployed and underpaid as a part-time private music instructor ... I have been searching for a full-time job with benefits for over a year now but have so far been unsuccessful.

This despite my having had a 4.0 GPA in my master's program and having a 3.9 GPA to date in my doctoral program, and being a member of national honor societies in both music and education. It's hard to tell if my lack of success in finding a "real" job is due to being considered "not a good fit" for those positions I have applied for, or if I'm simply "overqualified."

Hat tip, Danny.

By all traditional metrics, this person is way more qualified than me at pretty much everything. 4.0 in their grad program. 3.9 in a PhD program. And yet, except for about a month after I was fired in my very early twenties (because I was young and dumb), I've always found jobs with ease. Maybe I'm too pretty not to hire because it's certainly not my school track record that's getting me in the front door.

There are thousands of possible reasons that our hero can't find a job. But what I find telling is that is that the article was written by anonymous. If you're desperately seeking a job, why stay anonymous? I can tell you that if I was actively looking for a job and wrote an article like the one above, I'd be linking to my blog, twitter, etc, etc. Every possible online profile that I could. If I'm looking for a job, there's no value in staying anonymous, how else do employers find me?

I'll bet that whoever wrote that article doesn't have a blog. They're probably not spending a lot of time writing about what they're learning in school or what they're teaching as a private music instructor.

They need to be. The resume is dead and it's because more and more, people want you to show them what you've done, not tell them what you can do. The best job-hunting advice I ever got was from an article about getting a job on Wall Street. This partner at a trading house was complaining about all the kids who would come in for an interview with their resume and no portfolio. Loosely paraphrased (because this was ten years ago) he said

All of these kids tell me that they want to be traders. So why aren't any of them trading. Why aren't they taking a few grand and creating a portfolio? Or if they don't have the money why aren't they giving themselves an imaginary budget, "buying" a few hundred shares of different companies then tracking that for six months? I'll hire the first kid who shows me initiative even if he's lost money. I can teach trading strategies, I can't teach hunger.

This was back before blogs, before people really had their own websites. I didn't necessarily want to be in trading but I did like the advice. So I figured out how to get my own server online and I set up my own website. Now running a website wasn't going to convince anyone to hire me to be their network engineer, but I wanted to show them that I wasn't sitting around waiting for them to hand it to me. That when they mentioned a technology (DNS, Apache, ssh, etc) I, at least, had some hands on experience with it, enough to get it running anyway.

A good resume only proves that you're good at writing resumes. You can buy a book on how to write a killer resume, hire a service too look it over, inflate it.

How do I inflate my blog? Lie about my traffic? Try and sound smarter than I really am? Take credit for things I didn't do? All of that is so easy to see through it's ridiculous. You know, probably within minutes of reading, whether I know what I'm talking about or if I'm full of shit. And even if I know what I'm talking about, you probably can figure out within minutes of reading if I'm someone you want working with / for you.

The world is a changing and unless you want to be some meat puppet pushing papers on a project that no one gives a goddamn about anyway, you need to do something to differentiate yourself from everyone else out there. You need a portfolio.

I was trying to say that it hurts everyone when the conversation is fragmented and impossible to follow but then publishing 2.0 goes and says it so much better.

What would be best for users is if all the services were connected, so that all the data appeared on EVERY service, and it didn't matter which service I used to read or contribute -- the data would propagate throughout network.

Remember, it's the WEB -- the network, right? Stop obsessing over YOUR blog or YOUR service or YOUR node -- focus on enabling EVERYONE'S network. There's only ONE web.

This might be the funniest thing I've ever seen.

Shamelessly stolen from this article.

Also, there's a Monty Python skit out there called Tiger Brand Coffee but I can't find video of it. Anyone got a link? My googlefu is weak today.

This is an email I got and it's such a good question and it's something that I've thought so much about that I figured it might make for an interesting discussion here.

Are you reading Dick Masterson's book? I noticed that some portions of the book are his blog entries (some seem to be changed around slightly). When I had an agent she was ADAMANT about not writing anything on the web that would be in a book ("Why buy a book when you can get it for free?" was her motto). What are your thoughts as a writer?

Great content creates it's own market. As long as I can create great content that people want to consume I'll find a way to monetize it. Either by building traffic on my site and selling ads or by getting a publishing deal or by adapting what I've got for either a movie or TV series.

I used to be really wedded to this idea that I'd write books. If all you want to do is write books, then the agent may have a point. I'm not sure how many people are going to buy Suicide and Keg Stands after I've released it for free on the Internet. But I'm also not John Grisham or Stephen King. No one is buying the latest novel by Ben Corman because no one knows who Ben Corman is. So if giving away Suicide and Keg Stands is the price I pay to get the kind of attention I need to write for a living, so be it. I'll happily pay that price even if it means giving away S&KS and the novel after and the novel after that.

One of the best pieces of advice I got from one of my creative writing professors was that early in your career all you're trying to do is make a name for yourself. All you're trying to do is get known. Once that happens the money will come, but until people know your name it's almost impossible to support yourself writing.

The thing I really like about writing on the Internet is that I know, without a doubt whether people like my writing or not. If they keep coming back to read me, if they tell their friends about me, if my traffic slowly grows, then I'm doing something right. If, on the other hand, my traffic flatlines and withers, then I know that I'm doing something wrong. That is a vastly better indicator of whether you have talent then simply writing a book and asking an agent or a publisher "is this good enough, does this fit with your marketing goals?" I don't want to be told that I've got a good book but they don't know how they'd market it, or that my stuff isn't going to connect with the right demographic. I'll let my readers decide whether my writing is good enough. Readers aren't concerned with marketing or demographics or focus groups. Readers read what they like.

And getting a publishing deal gets me what exactly? A spot on some shelf in a bookstore? Every time I'm in a bookstore I walk past countless books without ever giving them a second look. So do those books fail because they aren't good or because there are literally too many choices for me to investigate? I don't seek out those books because I don't know about them, that's why making name for yourself as a write is so important.

On the other side of that, as the writer, there's a lot of power with being able to connect with your readers and know if it's the quality of the work. If my traffic falls off every week until no one is coming back I can't blame my publisher for not fully supporting my book release. Direct interaction takes a lot of the unknowns out of the equation.

I'm not even sure that the agent is right about "if you give it away for free, people won't buy it." Half of Tucker's book is stories from the site and it's still selling, he's spent like 10 months a year on the NYT Best Sellers list. Paulo Coelho is pirating his own books and it's caused sales to skyrocket. I'm on a mailing list from Tor books where they send me free PDF copies of books, no strings attached. Not everyone is freaked about the possibility that if it's available somewhere for free then sales will evaporate. If that was true, libraries would have killed publishing a long time ago.

At this stage of the game, all I'm worried about is getting my name out there and my writing in front of people. If I'm good, the money will come. If not, then it won't matter if I gave my writing away for free or not.

I'm going to post part of Sean's comment because I think he makes an excellent point.

[snip]

But after things are nice and open, something else happens. Smaller walled gardens appear, persist, and thrive. Keep in mind, a lot of Facebook's initial appeal was the fact that it was rather exclusive (colleges only.) There are other social networking sites out there that thrive in relative obscurity because they give users a feeling of being special or better. Often they're invite-only.

Part of me wonders if Facebook would have been better off (in terms of creating real value) if they hadn't tried to be a walled garden that appealed to everyone, to try and compete with Myspace.

You can be a walled garden and survive, but you have to give up the dream of appealing to everyone, of being the biggest. Facebook's strategic blunder has been that they're trying to have their cake and eat it too.

I think Sean is absolutely one hundred percent correct here and he touches on something that I've been thinking about but haven't really written about yet. It is better fill a niche and have users who are radically invested in your success than appeal to a broad base of people who are only lukewarm about whether you survive or not.

Think about the difference between Apple and Coors Light. There's a core group of Apple users who are absolutely fanatical about their products. Then there's a group of people who aren't fanatics but use Apple's products and would miss them if they disappeared. I'm in the second group. I've got an old PowerBook, an iPod and I'm a little obsessive about renting movies on iTunes. If any of those three disappeared tomorrow, I'd miss them as there's no other product that is a complete replacement. And if Apple stopped making computers and I had to go back to using a PC I might shoot myself in the face (I might be overstating that but Microsoft is churning out dogshit for OSes these days and my only real alternative to OS X is Linux and I've never been a huge fan of Linux on the desktop but I digress).

Now imagine if Coors Light disappeared tomorrow. Yep, that's the sound of no one caring. Now, which company is in a better position?

But neither of those are a walled garden and that's where this conversation started. I've said that walled gardens can never compete with the Internet and they can't. But what about a walled garden that isn't trying to compete with the Internet? That's really the heart of Sean's comments. When you use the fact that you're small and exclusive to your advantage you can absolutely succeed as a walled garden. The fact that you shield your users from the flood of crap on the Internet can be a very powerful draw. The history isn't written on Facebook yet, so they're not a very good example but lets look for a moment at a site called Heelpress.com. When I first found heelpress it was very much a walled garden. It was a site for writers who were in college. You needed to have a .edu address to sign up and while anyone could come to the site and read the writing posted there, the only people who could submit writing were people with a .edu address.

When I first found heelpress I loved it. I posted a lot of my early stories there because it was a great way to get feedback and to connect with other people like me. College aged writers. There were even other people in my creative writing classes at UCLA who were on the site and we used to talk about the site in class. We were well on our way to becoming fanatics.

Then heelpress did two things that moved it from awesome niche site to just another art site. They opened registration to anyone and they changed they focus from writing to art. And when they changed the layout of the site, they put the art above the fold and the writing below so you had to scroll down to see what was new in writing. They basically shit all over the people who had supported them early on (they've since put the art and writing next to each other).

I bet you can guess the day that I stopped logging into my heelpress account. What I was surprised to find (then not now) is that the people in my class had exactly the same reaction. It had become "lame, stupid, boring" and while no one muttered the magic "sell-out" phrase, we were damn well thinking it. Look at it another way. What if tomorrow flickr announced they were adding blogs. Could there be anything more lame?

But don't take my word for it. Look at their alexa ranking. They went from having a rank in the 20k range two years ago to being at 300k.

The worst thing facebook did was open themselves up to the world. They were never going to run out of college students to provide them with a userbase but they got greedy. They wanted as many eyeballs as they could get but they didn't realize that in the process they lost the very thing that made them special. They diluted the community so much that now they're just another social network site.

Which is more valuable, goodreads or facebook? If you go by valuations then facebook is the obvious answer, what's facebook worth these days, 2 trillion? 100 bajillion? Whatever it is, it's ludicrous. And you could probably buy goodreads for 30 bucks and a case of beer if you really wanted to.

If you really want to look at value though, you shouldn't sweat valuations because the people who are making the valuations don't really have any idea what audience on the Internet is worth. Said another way, page views aren't the best way to figure out if your site is worth anything.

And the other reason not to sweat valuations, especially now, is because facebook is a walled garden and if you're a fan of history, you know absolutely what happens to walled gardens on the internet. They fail in big ways. AOL started as a dailup content generation company. You called AOL with your computer and you interacted with everything that AOL had created for you to interact with. Chat rooms, games, forums, whatever. Fast forward to today, AOL is little more than a web portal. No matter how good the content AOL could generate on their own in their own walled garden, it could have never competed with the Internet in terms of bringing people the information they want.

Or look at instant messaging. It used to have the highest walls imaginable. AOL changed AIM's protocol numerous times in order to break third party clients and now I'm logged into my AIM account from my gmail inbox. For as long as AOL fought to keep AIM closed, I'm not sure they ever figured out how to monetize instant messaging.

Facebook is nothing more than the new AOL. No matter how good the content they generate, it can never compete with the internet as a whole. No matter how many zombie bite, scrabble or iLike applications they allow on their network, they're fighting a losing battle. What does facebook actually offer that's unique? The facebook feed? Easily duplicated with twitter. The ability to have your friends updates brought right to your page? Get an RSS reader. Notes? Blogger.com. Picture sharing? Who doesn't have a flicker account? Facebook at it's core is just a collection of web services and the reason it works is that unless you are serious about your online presence, it's easier to setup a facebook profile than it is to setup your own website.

The difference between those services I named and facebook is that those other services are open. I don't need a flickr account to see your photographs and I don't need a twitter account to follow your updates, etc, etc but if I want to see what you're up to at facebook, I need a facebook account.

That's why facebook has such a hard time monetizing it's content. It's got a lot of eyeballs staring at it, but it doesn't do anything well enough that people are willing to pay for it, either in real dollars or in letting facebook mine their personal data for advertising. Thus the failure of beacon. And thus the problem with the sponsored items in the feed, it's all hit or miss if I want money off Kaplan classes (I don't).

Compare that to flickr. Flickr's basic service is free and there's a hardcore group of users who pay for an upgraded account which gives them more features. It's the hardcore users that carry the service for everyone else. People are willing to pay for flickr because it does one thing extremely well.

Goodreads is a little like flickr. It's just trying to solve one problem, books. How to organize them and how to connect with people around them. From that core focus, the monetization arises naturally. All the ads on the site surround books and publishing and if I have a goodreads account, it's probably a safe bet that I'm interested in at least one of those two things. And from goodreads I can click through to amazon and buy books. I'm sure each transaction is linked to the goodreads affiliate account, so they get a kickback from amazon on whatever I buy. That's how you monetize users, by creating value for them. Not by shoving random offers at them.

I know I sound like a goodreads shill, but I'm not. I just wanted to use them as an example of what social networks are going to look like in the future. The largest social network ever created is the internet, it's just that we're still developing the tools that allow us to connect on the internet in meaningful ways. Tools that allow people to connect in these ways are going to survive. Walled garden aren't going to be able to compete and are going to die. So if you want to talk about value, bet on the services that seek to solve one problem well and connect people around an interest.

You never know what people are going to react to something on a blog. When I lamented about all my various profiles, I did so out of frustration but I struck something out there, because I've heard from a surprising number of people with work arounds, hacks, tricks or whatever on how to deal with so many profiles.

Everything from Mahalo's ability to load different social networking sites in an iFrame, to Friendfeed's aggregation of a number social sites, to facebook apps to consolidate all my functionality down to just a few sites.

The problem here is that they're all kludgy. There's no elegant solution that cleanly allows me to solve this problem. What exactly is the problem? There's two. As a content producer, I want to be able to reach as many people as possible. So cutting myself off from certain communities is setting myself up for failure. We're past the point on the internet where if you build it, people simply come. There's too much content being created for any one person or group of people to be able to find and filter what they like.

The second problem is that I want to be able to find content that I like in a limitless sea of content that's being created. That's where the real power of these social networks comes into play. They act as a giant recommendation machine, so the more people I'm connected with who share my tastes, the better I'm able to find cool stuff online.

But my giant recommendation machine only works if we're all connected in some meaningful way. If it's me and two friends listening to the same mixtape over and over again in my bedroom, we're not going to find a lot of new music. If I'm connected to promoters, friends, artists, etc there's a much better chance I'm going to find what I actually like.

And that's why all these profiles annoy me. I could just pick a few networks to belong to and stick there but then I'm limiting the interactions I have based on bullshit technical barriers that don't need to exist. Just the fact that all these sites are walled gardens who refuse to share data with each other. It doesn't make any sense, it's like having an email system where those with gmail accounts can only talk to other people with gmail accounts. If you want to talk to someone at yahoo, you have to go over there and start an account as well.

I think these social networks have a tremendous amount of value inherent in them, mostly because they mirror the real life networks we use every day. But until they stop trying to lock their users in, that value isn't going to be realized. We've seen walled gardens fail on the internet over and over again. I'm just waiting for this current set of walled gardens to either fail or evolve. Unfortunately they're doing neither fast enough.

If you read Seth's blog, you'll have already seen this but it's too good not to share.

Ryan has a really good habit of keeping track of all the books he's read and writing up little descriptions. It's something that I've thought about doing for a long time but never really got around to it. So I forced myself to join goodreads which is a social networking site (what today on the internet isn't a social networking site now?) based around books.

I'm primarily using it because it'll track my read, currently-reading, and to-read lists and I don't have to do any work, which I like. I'd thought about writing something similar for my blog which would let me do some fancy database magic and keep a record of all my books but why reinvent the wheel? So, if you're interested in what I'm reading you can follow me Corman @ Goodreads.

I wish I could get more excited about this because I read a lot and I absolutely love books but I'm suffering social networking site burnout. Between this site, and my profiles on myspace, del.icio.us, stumbleupon, facebook, twitter and now goodreads, I'm starting to find all the different ways to connect and talk to people overwhelming and redundant. Some people only message me on myspace, some only on facebook, some through email or by comments here. It's not that I don't want to hear from you out there, I do. It's that "checking my email" isn't just checking my email, it's now logging into at least six different sites, dealing with six different interfaces managing six different sets of saved / archives messages. Exhausting, or maybe I just haven't had enough coffee. But don't stop writing in, I like hearing from you all. I just need to figure out a better way to manage it.

I don't usually care about little tech tips that people tell me about because 90% of the time they suck, but this is so fucking cool --> gmail rocks your face right off your skull.