Just About Sums It Up As Neatly As I’ve Ever Seen …

Regardless of what I have been told, repeatedly, endlessly and obsessively … life (and blogging) are not about money.  Money is a part of life, and (most of us) we need to work, or do something, to get it.  Money is not the purpose of life (mine at least), but is indeed an integral part of the means to an end … survival and beyond that ways to begin, participate in and accomplish things that interest me and that I find important.

With respect to blogging and the ‘monetization of content" from personal publishers, someone may crack the code, the code being that people believe that material that is created … the output of someone’s creative energy and effort … has value to someone for x or y reasons. 

That is the gist of the notion of the Gift Economy .. in the absence of formal structured points of friction where we can exchange legal tender for ’something", we have only the option to "give" it to someone, whilst citing much of the traditional lore about the altruism of giving and its core role in reciprocity and community.

Well .. we live in a pretty frickin’ pragmatic world, us of the first world.  Yet, just yet .. what is ‘of value’ to me may not be the same as what is ‘of value’ to you. And therein lies what I believe will be very interesting ground for a large, amorphous and widespread socio-economic experiment in years to come.

Here’s Frank Paynter’s delicious take, titled Three Bags Full, on this notion.

(The above excerpt is not entirely without intention. It perhaps illustrates two things: one, that personal creative choices will lead us to vocational opportunities that are unique and personal, viz “Cooking Without Looking;” and, two, that this thing called blogging is its own reward, comprising readers and writers, linkage and thinkage… and sometimes - yes - stinkage, but not today, neither in this post’s origins nor in the novel in progress that I’ve linked here… we have an opportunity to help each other carry the canoe on that long portage, and sometimes there will be blueberries and sometimes there will be biting insects, but all in all, when the loon calls and the sun sets on the lake beyond, there are no simple answers, rather there are all these complicated relationships and quel domage that we find so many of them parsed into fifty minute segments with an IRC back channel).

Tags: listics, blogging, money, long tail, stinkage, gibberish, value, us weirdos

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