Pity the poor blogger

As we all know, it's a new media world out there. Web 2.0, which sounds like a phrase invented by the vulture capitalists, is attracting the kind of money Web 1.0 did, but we all know how that ended. Greed plays a critical role in every boom; followed by fear, which characterizes every bust.

Boom and bust, that is the economic cycle we San Franciscans have experienced every decade since 1849. A colleague from my Wired days, and an amateur historian, Todd Lapin, wrote one of my favorite pieces in all my years as an editor, commissioning hundreds of articles to hundreds of writers.

The original version was for a new city magazine that we launched in 2001. Later, we published a similar version in a special issue of another magazine, an art publication called Big, run by corrupt greedsters who never paid any of us for our substantial work on an issue devoted to San Francisco.

Nevertheless, Big facilitated a great party in the fall of 2004, as our San Francisco issue appeared on the newsstands. I'm not much for parties, but I'll never forget that one.

Anyway, Todd's story dealt with the life of Sam Brannan, a Mormon scout who was eventually rejected by the church's hierarchy, which chose Salt Lake City over our city for their headquarters. Probably a good decision for both of us. Brannan, however, felt abandoned by his overlords, which ended his faith but not his instincts for how to make a profit.

Once he had cornered the market on picks, axes, and triggered a press hysteria back east about the gold in our Sierra foothills, he became the very first millionaire in California history. He became a successful politician, and then a notorious drunk and womanizer.

(Our current mayor, Gavin Newsom, thus fits into a rich historical tradition, which is why we all embrace and forgive him for what elsewhere would be considered his transgressions.)

Back to Sam Brannan, for whom Brannan Street in SOMA is named for, and with no small irony served as the center of the Web 1.0 boom in the late '90s. As his disease progressed, he drunkenly mispronounced the name of a new town established north of here. He meant to say the "Saratoga of California," but what came out was the "Calistoga of Sarifornia."

Brannon lost everything, and died drunk and penniless in a gutter in San Diego. But Calistoga is the brand name of the state's favorite carbonated water, and that's not a minor legacy, is it?

In case this seems a long way from blogging, it is.

But a recent story on the business side of blogging in the Toronto Star claimed that only the top 100 blogs make any money.

Well, I have news for our friends in Canada. My modest little blog has yielded $201.78 to me in the past ten months, and that is real American cash. On the other hand, that translates into a per blog earning of $0.54, or a per word earning of less than $0.001, proving words are indeed cheap; and an hourly wage of ~$0.36.

So, if this is a business, I had better see whether they take reservations in that San Diego gutter where old Sam Brannan ended up, right?

Boom and Bust.

Thesis and antithesis.

Greed and sharing.

Alone or together.

It all comes down to the same decision: to write or not to write.

Now, there's a question I can answer.


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