quacky: —–+—+—–

The got milk? people have done something unconscionable.

Complete Stax/Volt Singles 1959-1968 boxset.

I just came across a bunch of these Stax-Volt box sets that I could have for relatively cheap. What a treasure! But there’s one problem, the MP3 tags are impossible! For whatever reason, they’re not auto-tagging from the web, or with my MP3 tagging programs. The darn things just don’t exist. So I’ve got about 3 or four (not quite sure) big piles of really badly tagged, nine-volume box sets of soul music. It’s not so bad, really, just a kind of mammoth data entry project. But MAN, I wish CD manufacturers would offer that their stuff was already tagged. don’t you?

I’m trying to figure out how to make money posting things on the internet. Note I don’t call it ‘blogging.’

I know a fair bit about this, and I have ethics. That right there, I bet, is my problem.

Thing is, I think to make money posting things on the internet, you have to be an “affiliate” or own a giant blogging network (in other words be an “affiliate herder”).

Here’s why: there are only two real/new money-making opportunities on the internet: a) selling things; and b) bothering the shit out of enough millions of internet people to get a miniscule slice of them them to buy things that the merchants are selling via the internet.

That’s what “affiliates” do. They’re the same thing as the people (who you never see!) who drive around posting flyers and sticking corrugated yellow plastic signs, markered with “earn money @ home” 800 numbers, along roadways. They’re nothing but spammers, if I’m being completely Simon Cowell.

I’ve been trying to make money on the internet doing what I have always believed was the coolest thing about the internet: sharing stuff. Along the way, I stuck in some google ads, thinking that if enough of you internet people came by and enjoyed the stuff I share, I can “monetize” my sharing with little or no effort. In about fifteen years of having google ads on a few sites I run, I’ve yet to make enough for google to actually cut me a check. That’s a mere $100 dollars.

So I started up a few other blogs too. With the thought that I just needed to better target what share on the internet, to attract a more specifically niched type of advertising. My collaborative community steak blog, for a while, seemed like a promising idea. But then it turned out that as large as I wrote “this is a really cool idea, join us!” on the front page of that site, nobody seemed to want to join in to share their own stuff on my page. So I quickly discovered that I had to nag friends and relatives to write their own stuff, remember to take pictures of their steaks, etc. or else I’d have to provide all the content myself.

One guy, in a little town in the corner of the country, with a fairly limited budget, can’t singlehandedly write a community collaborative guide to steak that aims to cover the entire nation of steak dining opportunities. So that dried up, and eventually, after posting bare uncommented links, and stealing from flickr and google image search, that site pretty much died.

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