Jack William Bell's Journal: Freelancing to the masses

This post is partly for my friend Jim Kling, who is a science writer living in D.C. (He has another web addie, but it isn't responding.)

David Appell of Quark Soup, a science writer from Maine, decided to try an experiment. Instead of pitching an article idea to the usual cast of editors he pitched it to the readers of his blog. At the cut-rate of $200 (it was an experiment after all) he would be willing to research and post an article on the sugar industry playing politics with WHO to the web first. Any readers interested in seeing it should pledge a few sheckels via Pay-Pal and if he hit the magic number out comes the article. Otherwise pledges would be refunded.

Well, it worked. In less than 24 hours he collected $370. Yet another indication that the web is eventually going to change the business model that the big media companies are built around!

I don't know what it is going to look like in ten or twenty years, but I do know that the distribution of media and information is going to change drastically. The sooner the buggy-whip manufacturers see this and switch to making door handles and fuzzy dice, the better...

Freelancing science-fiction writing

[salimma]

You might want to try reading The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect [kuro5hin.org], a dystopian novel about a future run by an almost omnipotent AI governed by Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.

It goes by a voluntary donation scheme, and there is a pledge programme; should enough people pledge the book will go to the printing press.

Re:Freelancing science-fiction writing

[Jack William Bell]

Way ahead of you! I posted an entry on that called Metamorphosis of the Prime Tip Jar [slashdot.org] three weeks ago. This is definately one of my favorite subjects, so expect to see more along this line as I find it...

Re:Freelancing science-fiction writing

[salimma]

Ah yes, I thought someone did that, but I could not remember who it was :)

His latest short story is not doing too well on Kuro5hin though, you might want to read it from the submission queue, and possibly vote it up.

It appears people are a bit squeamish; the topic was a business model for casinos in a Prime Intellect universe..

Jim's journal

[anitar]

hey, I didn't know Jim was on LJ. cool!

Re:Jim's journal

[jkling]

Just got on a few months ago but wasn't doing much with it until I went to Penguicon and partied with Jack a couple of weeks ago. People were talking up blogs, including one rather attractive blonde whom I followed around for a few hours Saturday night. Either the intellectual stimulation or the blonde got me blogging on a regular basis.

Re:Jim's journal

[jkling]

Oh, and a great job on KUOW last week, btw!

Re:Jim's journal

[anitar]

Thanks! It was a fun show. I'd have talked it up ahead of time, but it was a last-minute thing for me to actually be on the show instead of just calling in.

From Jack's description, I thought the blond was following you!

As you can see from my daily crawl list, I follow a number of live journal folk and even comment there, though not a member. they are mostly people I already know through fandom.

Journalism patrons

[jkling]

This is an interesting idea. I have a passing professional acquaintance with David, so if nothing else I was excited to see he has a blog. I've been thinking of doing something similar with mine, but haven't been doing it long enough to figure out what exactly I want to do with it.

The sponsored article... I like it. Think we'll go back to the days of old when scientists had patrons? Maybe journalists will have patrons. That's sort of the logical direction, given that a few people gave David money but lots