left a lengthy comment on the post regarding my imminent sellout.

as he is the welcomed guest, his comments will be normal, while mine will be in italics.

Tony,

One point you may have overlooked in my quote from that article is the following: “[I]t comes down to ‘versioning’ the content. A walled-garden approach to charging for all your content would be a disaster for all but a rare few kind of online publisher (e.g., porn sites or wsj.com). But many sites should be able to find some versions of their content people will be willing to pay for.”

That is, I’m not suggesting you charge an entry fee for the main blog itself, but rather, charge people 50 cents to view your famous photo commentaries, or let them have unlimited access to them for a year for $5.

i can understand this way of thought, but my site and my blog will always remain free. i’ll make my millions somewhere else.

You could, of course, let them see the first five pictures in the series for free and have to pay for the whole thing, and maybe even let one in five of the photo spreads remain freely available. But why shouldn’t you charge for those? The main blog would still be free, so it’s not like you’re cheating readers out of everything.

a few problems about charging for the photo essays, besides the hippie moral ones for me. biggest one is a lot of the best photo essays – the ones people would pay for – are created using photos that i didnt take. last thing i would want to do is profit from someone else’s art.

if i did compile a few photo essays using original pictures, i wouldnt want to run into a problem with having to pay my models. and let me tell you, karisa has a hard ass agent.

But aren’t your photo spreads — truly unique content in the blog world — worth 50 cents per viewing? For anyone who’s seen them in the past, absolutely they are. They obviously take you hours to prepare and are wonderfully creative, so why shouldn’t you be compensated for them?

they do take a long time. usually an entire day or two. i would love to charge 50 cents per viewing. especially for the ones like the Anna Penthouse one where 4 million people showed up. only problem is i dont know of any way to charge 50 cents through paypal and not have them charge me a buck per transaction.

As for your comment, “…there are companies and advertisers who are more than willing to align themselves to personalities, writers, and now bloggers,” I’d venture that you are not an expert in the online ad sector. I challenge you to name one advertiser lining up to sponsor bloggers.

i am no expert in anything, really. but just because it hasnt happened yet, doesnt mean that it wont happen soon. there was a time when no one ever considered to pay nba players millions to wear their shoes, or sponsor devil worshipping rock bands to go on tour. i wouldnt consider it outrageous for computer companies, sugar water giants, and software manufacturers to find ways to influence big time bloggers into talking about their products and keeping them loyal.

And the idea that Nike would pay you $2 million is especially absurd, particularly when you’re saying nasty things about them.

fuck nike.

my price now to sell out to them is $3 million.

There are two key problems to going down the ad route for bloggers: 1) You actually have to work like hell to sell the ads (ask Rafat Ali, who spends all day doing so). Talk about distasteful work for most bloggers. Even then it’s hard as hell, as the number of page impressions most bloggers generate aren’t enough to make the average big advertiser look twice. 2) You have to either corrupt your morals and stop saying nasty things about your advertisers like Nike, or quickly lose their contracts in exchange for your freedom (again, ask Rafat, who’s lost three advertisers because of his independent-mindedness).

fuck nike.

As for hoping to get hired to write a blog for someone, I would think any publisher would be only too lucky to get you, but I would also venture that it would be a loss for BusBlog readers, as I suspect you’d find it very difficult to blog substantially in two places at once. Talk to Elizabeth Spiers about that one.

i agree. they would be lucky. as for difficulty blogging for two different things, what you see here on the busblog is done during my two 15-minute breaks and a quickie little entry before i go to sleep. not only would the blog i write professionally be way better than this one, but the happiness that i would have with a job where i could be creative would make the busblog an even happier place.

Frankly, I think charging espeically loyal readers for premium content would be the best way to assure both your independence and your ongoing commitment to this blog. The attitude among many bloggers that “information wants to be free” harkens back to the early days of the dot-com bubble, and we all know how that ended up.

wanting things to be free goes back further than that. and further than the 60s. there were a lot of great things about the dot com beginnings and idealism was one of them. trying new things is another. neither of those was the cause for the crash. but i hear what youre saying. still, the busblog will be free, especially to my loyal readers.

Finally, as for a micropayment system, it already exists.

then hook me up and claim your percentage.

bruner blog + inluminent + viral planet

the cubs had just won and she was going through mlb.com and trying to find out what i liked and i told her that all i wanted for my birthday was for the cubs to be in the world series and she said im sorry but i dont see that here on this web site.

so i said for her to look harder. shes the best mom. i didnt have the heart to tell her that theres nothing i need any more. me and karisa were saying the same thing last night. she said if the red sox won the world series that she’d be done with her lifes goals and i told her that just the cubs being in the world series was enough for me, but having them win…

im pissed off as fuck right now. can you tell? i am. im steaming. here i am trying to go over the analysis of chopper one. they just did a bunch of quote unquote fixes to something that wasnt even broke. then some asshole was an asshole to me because hes an asshole and im supposed to be responsible for everything.

i have never hated a job so much as i hate trying to save los angeles from itself and its not because the good people of la dont appreciate it, they do. they dont see us, when they do they scream and cry cuz they dont know who we are, its the marines running the xbi that make this such a pain in the ass. i am literally in danger half of the time that im working. and then some. the bad guys see me when im doing my grocerying they see me drag my laundry down the street in my granny cart, they see me getting frozen yogurt with the cheerleaders. at any time they could avenge the death of their father. and thats all during my off hours. and still these jackholes who are supposed to be helping me hurt me at every turn. and all i want to do is get in a hippybus and get the heck out of here.

why is that so hard to have come true?

arnold can be governor if he wants and hes not half as qualified for doing that as i am for what i want and he gets it. why. because hes rich. because his friends are rich. because he says hes a repub. because he made movies about killing and death that made people somehow feel good about themselves about and i and committing violence with grammar right now im sorry but i am so pissed off right now and i dont know what is wrong with me but if you saw me in the halls right now i would have the biggest smile but thats so fake and so not true that i just have to do another day of this its killing me.

before the dot com a few years ago i looked twenty years old. that crazy job and this one equals five years and i swear to you its aged me thirty years. if it wasnt for rogaine and rum and the kindness of the readers of the internet i would look like charles bukowski right now.

i chatted last night with splinky who i really should travel with cuz shes just as nuts as i am. i love my house as much as she likes hers but we both feel the same way about traveling. the answer is yes. lets go. who the fuck cares where. who the fuck cares how. just go. get out. get away from the demons tapdancing on the dreams. they dont fly first class and bunk in a hostel. they are crushed by adventure. they are destroyed by new friendships found in a tavern where nobody speaks english and nothing is familiar. they get lost in the train stations where all roads lead to everywhere. if theres one thing i dont know about its geography and last night she said lets go here and i said wheres that and she said indonesia and i was ashamed to say wheres indonesia cuz im supposed to be all smart and shit but i asked mr internet and he said indonesia is where bali is and the more i looked and read i realized that bali isnt a country its a city the country is called indonesia and its far as fuck away from this nightmare and i saw the news reports about bali and indonesia and they said something about a bus blowing up and you know what my bus nearly kills me once a week so whats the difference. the difference is better weather and leeches. the difference is the leeches dont pretend to be helping you in indonesia.

and beer costs a quarter.

cubs have the day off today and if you think this didnt help me and i dont feel better and i wont look at evil in the eye today and smile and move on move on dont stop and save the world then you dont know me at all.

artlung + makeout city + totally kickass job last night red sox fans

of course, i dont believe it.

they say if the velvet underground werent so far ahead of their time they woulda sold way more records.

they say that sometimes being ahead of your time is just as bad as being behind the times.

they say a lot of things. sometimes i feel like thats all they do. blah blah blah. yapping away with their meatflaps. but what are they saying. theyre not saying anything except here i am here i am

here i am.

here i am looking at my new playstation 2 that i got off ebay. im back to reading a lot of bukowsk, raymi, and he spent most of his life in a totally worthless job while living in hollywood getting drunk and fucking at night and going to the grind in the daytime. but mostly he waited for everyone else to catch up. to get it. to begin the beguine.

68. dan

and while he waited he typed his pretty poems and ugly stories and fascinating novels and he got better. rote i was once told will not help you and i said what will then and he said you just have to get it. and of course, i disagreed. rotes everything.

me and this one chick. not a cheerleader, but still hot because theres only hot girls in hollywood. tan eyes. bazooms like for bedays. lots of times we would just look at each other and say the dirtiest things trying to turn each other on. the things that would seep out her her pouty lipglossed smirk would raise more than your eyebrow and she knew her power but she didnt know that i knew it cuz im the great. tony the great. id say something like ive seen it all baby what makes you so good and shed tell me and shed turn herself on by telling me and then shed show me how turned on she was. and our eyes would be locked onto each others and the game was called chicken and chickens cluck which rhymes with luck and im soaking in it.

cubs beat the living shit out of the fish which makes me happy because every day at work im basically the spokesperson of the chicago cubs and today i had to explain the loss, spinning it, telling people it wasnt really a loss. someone would pass by me in hall and see my cubs hat and say sorry or say whats happening to them and id say eight runs we scored. and tomorrow i can say we scored twelve and coulda scored more but we wanted to save some for the fish.

shes saying come to bed and im saying im writing and she said i didnt say come to sleep and i said i know what you said see through everythings perfume soap sparkle shine hair from somewhere wonderful perfect skin lips tongue hips sort of girl the crude would say was built for it sort of girl who would agree asks to see then puts her nothing next to my knee and then on it. wants it. hates being ignored and overlooked. hates being put on the backburner and i tell her theres something here for you and i say a playstation 2 and she sits down on the lazyboy and rolls her white things up one leg and then the other and she says arent there enough toys in here for you.

and my friend the internet says yes. and the tivo boings yes. and the cd changer says yes and the french girl says oui but she says it so fast it sounds like a whistle fashizzle. last night i walked down hollywood blvd and then tonight i did it too. walked past the clubs. the hotties love to dance, doesnt matter what day the paper says it is. they dress up like no where else, maybe new york but f new york todays all about boston who did what needed to be done tonight and deserves a shot on the house.

she feels so ignored shes getting bored and when shes done fiddling with the video game she says you know youre going to get something out of this too and i said what, you, and she says nothing she just keeps her mouth wide open like she cant believe i said that but of course i said that my team has scored twenty runs over two games in the playoffs they peaked when they should have peaked. everything is timing. who cares if you score twenty runs in two games in april or may or june or july its in october when the freaks come out when you have to score twenty and then some and if you lose one then keep hitting and see how many times you lose again and she leaned her head back and closed her eyes and she wasnt complaining any more she was doing what she wanted to do and it was cute and then it was hot

and then it was irresistable and then the christmas lights clicked off cuz it was past one twenty and the timer does that and all i could see was the light on her curves from the bulb over the sink in the bathroom and i said what on earth am i doing with a girl that hot in my hottub and if anyone was around to esp me they would have replied back with a smartass remark like

timing. and i dont care what happens tomorrow, i love you, and i always have, and there will be a time in the sun and until then remember your sunscreen of fun.

21mm + recall totals by country + moxie is so fine