OKAY. THIS IS WHAT I’M A GONNA DO.
The online and print versions of this here verbal venture have acted as loss-leaders for each other.
Way-bad business planning, no?
So the print magazine’s going to an all-paid-circulation format either this next issue or the one after. You’ll still be able to get single copies in Seattle, but at fewer spots, and they’ll cost ya.
Ya wanna be a freeloader and read the stuff without payin’? You’ll hafta go online. And even then, you’ll be asked to contribute.
By today, we should have instituted a donations box on this here main page. Look for it. It means you can take a quarter from your credit or debit card and help support this here low-budget but definitely not no-budget textual venture.
You can donate as often as you like; even more than once the same day.
It’s run through a middleman outfit called PayPal. Eventually, I’ll turn the online ordering of the print magazine and our books over to PayPal too. (The outfit doing that part now has done a fine job; but its own screens and help files presume you’re buying “shareware” software, not books or magazines.)
Could the PayPal system be the answer for long-sufferin’ web content creators, or even a path toward such an answer?
It’s not the “micropayments” scheme some have advocated for years, going back to Ted Nelson’s long-proposed Xanadu system. With micropayments, readers would be charged pennies (or even fractions of pennies) for every view of a web page run by a participant in the plan. But it’s as close to it as anyone, to my knowledge, has gotten actually running.
IN OTHER NEWS: There was a gang-related shooting in Pioneer Square last Saturday. Mayor Paul Schell, showing his continuing descent into the influence of reality-challenged City Attorney Mark Sidran, immediately blamed it on hiphop music. The next night, another gang shooting broke out in Chinatown. The mayor declined to blame it on karaoke. Nor has he chosen to blame the Belltown muggings earlier this month on the undue spread of $100-a-plate restaurants.
OTHER WORDS (from page3.com’s “Joke of the Day” page): “Put simply, the core humour preferences of many of the Western world’s men, as we see it, can be roughly summarised thus:
“Brits: sex, booze, the Irish/Scottish/Welsh, English uperiority over everyone else.
“Americans: sex, lawyers, Bill Clinton, death, stupid Southerners.
“Canadians: sex, America, penis size, how great/well-endowed Canada is/Canadians are.
“Australians: sex, beer, masculinity whatever the consequences, sheep, Kiwis.
“Kiwis: sex, beer, masculinity whatever the consequences, sheep, Australians.”
TOMORROW: That ’70s Column.
ELSEWHERE:
