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The New York Times published an article that analyzes why bloggers get into the business. More bloggers are using their sites to earn revenue from advertising links, promote their products and services, and gain authority in their fields of interest. As the economy stumbles, bloggers face a variety of choices. Should they concentrate on their regular jobs and abandon their blogs? Should they leap full-time into the blogosphere and try to make a living from the web?

One thing’s for sure: few bloggers really do a reasonable income from their blogs. It is possible to make a living from blogging, although it can take years to build enough readers and advertisers to generate sustainable revenue streams. I mentioned Perez Hilton on 20 March 2008. His income has increased quite a bit over the last year, although keeps getting sued in court over his blog’s content, according to this Wikipedia article.

BoingBoing grows

BoingBoing’s four co-editors each have paying writing jobs that they promote heavily on BoingBoing. For years, the web site has posted weird news items focused on technology and the Internet. Over time, the blog became one of the most popular sites of its kind on the Internet. According to an article on Wikipedia, BoingBoing added a business manager in 2004 to administer the site’s operations.

Advertising was added to the site and its RSS feeds soon afterwards, to defray the site’s bandwidth charges. Popular web sites can rack up a large bill for their Internet connection. Adding ads to the site’s pages and overall design is a key success factor.

In the last few months, BoingBoing’s web site has been redesigned to include discussion threads and a subsidiary blog focused on electronic gadgets. The core writers still post articles every day, but they have brought in more people to administer the site and run the site’s discussion forums. Honda has signed on as a sponsor. There’s also a video site, although BoingBoing’s writers seem stiff and uncomfortable in front of the camera. Perhaps they will get better over time, as they build an independent media empire from their quirky web site.

A uniform approach

Paul Lukas’ Uni Watch is a good example of how to build income from a blog. Paul is a freelance journalist who has appeared in the New York times. His blog is an obsessive study of sports uniforms. Paul posts one article each day, with a long trail of links and miscellaneous items. By the end of the day, users have posted at least a hundred comments as they debate the topics of the day.

The blog had been funded by advertising links and user memberships. A basic membership included a uniform-themed wallet card, while more expensive packages included a custom designed logo and an interview posted to the blog.

A few days ago, Paul announced that ESPN had picked him up as a regular contributor. Paul had been writing freelance articles for ESPN’s Page 2 web site. He had already hired an intern a few months ago to manage the discussion boards and post articles on the weekends. Paul has decided he can scale back the blog membership program to the basic level, now that ESPN is supporting him. After almost 2 years of blogging, he can take a vacation or two without shutting down the blog completely.

The AP reported that a new, third-generation GPS satellite was successfully launched for the United States Air Force from Florida. As I mentioned on 17 March 2008, the Air Force has a lot on its plate these days. The new satellite weighs two tons, is 11 meters long and 2 meters wide. The average GPS satellite has an 8 year life span, so the Air Force must launch replacements on a regular schedule to maintain the 24-satellite system. See HowStuffWorks and NASA for more information about how the Global Positioning System actually works.

Yesterday, the Honolulu Advertiser published an article about digital TV conversion. On 17 February 2009, US television stations will stop broadcasting analog television signals. On that date, anyone in the US who uses an antenna to receive their television signal on their analog television will need a digital converter box to receive broadcast signals. Cable and satellite subscribers have or will get converter boxes as part of their service agreement. All televisions manufactured for sale in the US after 1 March 2007 are required to have a digital tuner, so these models don’t need a converter box. The AP has an article with additional details.

I’ve discussed the FCC’s 700 mHz auction on 18 March 2008 and 30 January 2008. When the analog television channels are abandoned, AT&T, Verizon and other companies will use those frequencies for mobile phone and data services.

The US Department of Commerce has a web site with information on the DTV conversion, as does the FCC. Government regulators and consumer activists fear that cable and satellite companies will use digital television to scare up new subscribers. Another AP article states that Hispanics are the ethnic group most likely to lose television service after the conversion, even as the Federal government gives away several million coupons for digital converter boxes. Hawaii has a diverse population, and getting the message out in multiple languages will be challenging. I expect to see more articles in the local papers, especially in early 2009, even though the Advertiser claims that only 5.5% of the state’s television viewers rely on broadcast signals.

Digital TV converter boxes won’t turn an old analog set into a higher-definition TV, of course. These boxes have a digital TV tuner that passes its output to an analog TV on channel 3 or 4, like a video game console would do.

Yahoo reports that broadcasters will be required to run public service advertising, in an effort to notify viewers well before the cutover. The coupon request page uses reCAPTCHA – the same system I use to screen out spam comments on this blog.

From Gizmodo via BoingBoing comes a discussion of electronic book ownership. Electronic books or e-books are digital versions of a book. Users read the e-book on a computer, PDA, or a special e-book reader.

Amazon has its Kindle e-book reader, but I’m not willing to pay US$400 for it. I read enough books every year that Amazon could just give me the reader, and let me buy the e-books. The same goes for Sony’s reader, but at least the Kindle can download books and content through Sprint’s mobile phone network. Sony’s reader has to be loaded from a computer.

Both the Gizmodo and BoingBoing posts are based upon an article in the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review entitled The (Potential) Legal Validity of E-book Reader Restrictions, and written by Rajiv Batra, John Padro, Seung-Ju Paik and Sarah Calvert. The article wasn’t available on the Review’s web site, so I’m relying on portions that were posted to the Gizmodo post.

The used paper book

In the United States, paper books may be resold according the first sale doctrine. This rule helps support the used textbook market, by allowing book purchasers to transfer their ownership of a book to another party without violating the copyright holders’ rights. A key point of this rule is that no copies can be made of the book. The book’s owner cannot run down to the copy shop, make a backup or archival copy of the book, and then resell or return the original copy.

As I pointed out on 4 February 2008 in my discussion of this Kevin Kelly post, electronic media are a copy of an original source file. The Internet is a massive digital copy machine, after all. Web users are looking at copies of files their web browser has retrieved from other servers. Batra and his three co-authors address the implications of e-books upon the first sale doctrine. Could a used e-book market exist? Probably not, because e-book purchases don’t have their own physical copy of the book. They might have a license to use an electronic copy of the book.

As the four law students point out, it is up to the courts to determine if purchasing an e-book license is comparable to purchasing a paper book. The authors then discuss the restrictive DRM that Sony and Amazon have added to their electronic book hardware.

Selecting a textbook

It’s enough to give me a wee headache, especially as I evaluate new textbooks for my courses. Instructors use textbooks so students have a ready resource and reference in the course. Textbooks are expensive and heavy, especially in graduate courses. E-books are a nice option, but electronic gadgets are heavy and expensive, too. Many users have problems reading an e-book, and sometimes its difficult or impossible to make notes in an e-book. Paper books don’t need electricity, either.

I really like paper books, but I fear that their days are numbered. Textbook publishers are more sensitive to student complaints about textbook costs these days. The textbook industry has seen what’s happened to the music publishers. It’s not hard to find scanned electronic copies of popular textbooks on file-sharing services. When a significant number of university students stop buying textbooks, we may enter a runaway change scenario. Some academic authors already self-publish their textbooks, so they can offer paper and digital copies at a low price and keep more of the revenue. At some point, the major textbook publishers have to decide what business they are in: the paper book publishing business, or the content distribution business.

Textbooks unbound

I have spoken with two publishers who offer shrink-wrapped versions of their textbooks. These are unbound versions of textbooks. The pages are three-hole punched, so students can slip the book into a binder, or carry the chapters they need for a specific day. This business model sounds more reasonable than an e-book.

There’s a catch, of course. A shrink-wrapped book cannot be returned or sold back to a university bookstore in many cases. So a shrink-wrapped paper copy of a book is, in some ways, as restrictive as an e-book. Of course, students can sell or pass along their used binder books to other students. Unless a student examines that binder closely, they are trusting that the binder includes every page of the book. It’s much easier to pull pages from a binder than from a traditional bound book. That’s one reason that bookbinding helps maintain the value of a paper book.

It’s possible to copy a bound book, of course, but it’s a much faster process if the binding is removed. The scanned or copied pages look more consistent, too. The book’s resale value is destroyed when the binding is removed, but the electronic copies of that paper book can be redistributed.

The unbound paper textbook is a sign that textbook publishers are dealing with runaway change that may outpace their companies abilities to adapt and survive. I haven’t mentioned other tactics the textbook publishing industry uses to lock-in customers and enhance value, including custom publishing, digital and web-based content.

Related posts and pages on billso.com

• Copyright and fair use
• Creative Commons
• 3 June 2008: 100 years of first sale
• 24 March 2008: The used electronic textbook
• 4 February 2008: Better than free
• 5 October 2007: What’s wrong with copyright?
• 17 July 2007: A quick explanation of copyright law

Thirteen months ago, Intel showed off a prototype CPU with EIGHTY cores on the same piece of silicon. It uses about as much electricity as a traditional desktop CPU. This news.com article has some information:

Intel used 100 million transistors on the chip, which measures 275 millimeters squared. By comparison, its Core 2 Duo chip uses 291 million transistors and measures 143 millimeters squared.

The hard part of the design isn’t putting the cores on the same die. The chips have to talk with each other. Routers on the silicon die help assign computations to individual chips, and move finished computations to neighboring chips.

It’s a prototype, so the chips are very basic. It’s incompatible with Intel’s x86 platform. Writing software for a multi-core CPU is difficult, so the demonstrations are very limited. The chips need their own RAM, because external RAM modules like those used in personal computers won’t work. Wikipedia’s article on multicore processors is a good read, and the reference list is helpful.

Intel has a web page about the project, and here’s two YouTube videos with more details.