Giving It Away
December 7, 2006I’ve been an advocate of open source for a number of years now, and the number one ‘objection’ I encounter is “but you can’t make money out of open source”. Well, who say’s so?
I’ve been giving away my books ever since my first novel came out, and boy has it ever made me a bunch of money.
Cory Doctorow is certainly a shining example of how giving it away CAN reap huge rewards, both financial and otherwise. Cory tallked a little bit about this when he visited Melbourne recently. You can see my wrap up if you missed it.
State of the darylcook-osphere
December 5, 2006I don’t place too much emphasis on webstats and I don’t have an inflated ego, so I’m not all that bothered about them, but I am curious about who’s visiting the site, what is of interest to others that I’ve written etc. I also noticed that–even with light posting over the past couple of months—somehow I managed to make it to the AustralianBlogs list at 659. No, I’m not the noisiest blogger in Oz, but not a bad effort considering.
November has been one of the best months I’ve had blogging in terms of my site stats – if you can really read anything into that! My stats show high numbers for me in terms of ‘unique visits’, and have by far been the best month I’ve had this year for ‘number of visits’.  I think that the stats go to prove one thing – that regularity of posting definitely has a positive effect on the number of people hitting your website. My Tasmania series of posts probably helped with that. I had some positive feedback about it too, which is nice. I enjoyed writing it — it provided me with a welcome distraction from the perils of flying, and having to make sandwiches for the following days trip.  I’ve still got a tassie wrap-up post to write, so stay tuned for that one (I’ll get there eventually).
Blogger takes on the Ocean
September 8, 2006I promised my good friend Nick that I’d post something about his planned solo yachting adventure. I’ve been providing counsel to him about releasing his ideas into the wild, via his blog and we have been musing on the relative merits of a formal, polished approach to his PR for his project, versus a more open, natural and authentic approach. I genuinely hope that the later approach proves to be right and my faith in the whole cluetrain, and global microbrand meme is upheld.
So, to get things rolling, I wrote a press release for Nick to put up on his site in the hope that I can pay it forward for Nick and generate some traffic and interest in his story. It’s probably a little contrived but I honestly believe that this is a story that will be of interest to others. If you agree with me, please digg it, blog it, help out with some link lovin’ to Nick’s site or contribute in some other way to spreading the word, as far and wide as possible.
Changes to my Permalink Structure
June 6, 2006I changed my permalink structure the other day so that my post titles are included in the URL. I think that during the migration from WordPress 1.5 to 2.0 they changed back to the default. Seems that changing them back is probably not the best thing to do with a blog that has been up and running for a while … I’m getting lots of 404 errors at the moment. Bare with me folks.
Life Imitating Art.
June 6, 2006Life imitating Art. I could have written this exact post. Perhaps less eloquantly, but nevertheless, an amazing coincidence–or have I unconciously given in to some form of blogosphere social pressure? … and no I’m not merely link-baiting.
I too have spent the last couple of weeks with my head in books, switching off the ‘idiot box’, taking the dog for a walk and spending more time meditating. I don’t have anything against TV per se, there just seems to be little on it that I find interesting or that entertains me. The exception to this is Spicks and Specks and RockWiz (Music quiz shows), which I really enjoy.
Reading also makes me want to write more, although to date this hasn’t really translated into keystrokes. I’ve been reading a fair bit of Beat poetry and the history of the Beat generation, including its influence on music and artists such as Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison. I’ve got a vague idea about writing an essay of sorts on the similarities of the Beats and bloggers, but I’m still clarifying my thoughts on this.
I also thought that as a consequence of the increased level of reading that I’d be blogging more, but that hasn’t happened either. Perhaps it’s a case of too much input making it harder to process the information and translating this to output? There doesn’t seem to be a direct correlation between input and output, that’s for sure.
