If you really want to be prepared for the future, start a weblog where you post sound clips, and update it daily. Daily updates are more important than polished content, especially if you're honest about the state of your current noodlings. Having a comment section where you reply to peoples's comment sections regularly is also very important. In the future, it will be all about monetizing your loyal readership, so it's important that you develop one as soon as possible and keep it well fed and happy.
ooh. i know who you are, kid. i'm not going to say how i found you, because i have no intention of blowing your cover, or making it easy for others to follow the same path of discovery that i did.
you know what might be a good topic to write about, though: how a popular open-source project eventually gets "monetized," to use the typical cliche. since you're flying all over the place and bought a house, i assume it must have happened for you. i'm working on a pie-in-the-sky research project with no obvious profit potential that might get popular as well. it could give me ideas on where to put my efforts.
best of luck to you. it's inspiring to see somebody work hard on an off-the-wall non-obvious idea and make good at it.
As a general rule, users can be monetized. They can't be monetized very well - a few cents per user is more than most people accomplish. But when you get to millions of users that suddenly isn't so bad. So my advice is to blindly follow the path of maximal number of users, and then worry about approaches to monetization later.
The flying around is mostly because lots of people want me to speak, by the way. I don't get paid for it.
I try to keep this blog and my other identity separate. It used to be darn near impossible to tell that it was the same person. Unfortunately I'm notable enough now that that's getting difficult to do. So for now I'm settling with people randomly surfing from my 'real' identity not finding this identity, so at least I don't get harassed.
off the top of my head, yours is the third "theory of open-source monetization" i can think of. torvalds method: start a popular project, be good at politics, get other people to do most of the work for you, project becomes indispensible, live happily ever after. definitely not for me. redhat "give away the razor and sell the blades" method: have a good product, sell support and services. requires tons of start-up capital. yours seems to be a variation of the torvalds method, without the layers and layers of leutenants
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Torvalds is making a lot less money than he should be. He should own a good chunk of red hat, not be working for them for regular salary. Red hat's model is also unproven - their revenues don't justify their market cap by any stretch of the imagination. Much more straightforward is IBM's approach to linux, which is that they want to use it, so they develop for it
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Don't worry, the market for musicians is going to change less than you might expect, but the need for suits is going to evaporate.
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you know what might be a good topic to write about, though: how a popular open-source project eventually gets "monetized," to use the typical cliche. since you're flying all over the place and bought a house, i assume it must have happened for you. i'm working on a pie-in-the-sky research project with no obvious profit potential that might get popular as well. it could give me ideas on where to put my efforts.
best of luck to you. it's inspiring to see somebody work hard on an off-the-wall non-obvious idea and make good at it.
Reply
The flying around is mostly because lots of people want me to speak, by the way. I don't get paid for it.
I try to keep this blog and my other identity separate. It used to be darn near impossible to tell that it was the same person. Unfortunately I'm notable enough now that that's getting difficult to do. So for now I'm settling with people randomly surfing from my 'real' identity not finding this identity, so at least I don't get harassed.
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