Silly business algorithms.
I ran across this [url=http://www.lemonadegame.com/]game on [url=www.metafilter.com]MeFi a couple of days ago, saved the link, and toyed with it a time or two.
Saturday afternoon, a Gemini buddy returned my [signed] copy of Pud’s [url=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00008AJC5/fishinguideto-20]book.
Running an enterprise, like “Fishing Guide to the Stars” [empire, live bait & sushi, used tires and apartments for rent] was a game for a while. Just like that stupid “Lemonade Stand.”
I’m not running out of money, per se, but I’m tired of dancing around to make ends meet. It’s not fun anymore.
Like that Lemonade Stand, though, I can’t find a decent business model. There are two ways to do it, either become some kind of astrology hegemony, like the big boys and girls, or worse, evolve into a fascist astrological regime, again, like the big boys and girls.
Neither of those two options is appealing.
I’m just hoping for a silver bullet to show me the way to make all this work. As it is, it’s working okay, but I know there’s something missing. That one piece to the puzzle.
Or, I was hoping for a model to follow because I’m damn tired of blazing trails.
“Kramer was here, he left his hatch mark.”
Roundabout answer, maybe…
I’ve been successfully churning out horoscopes for over a decade now. Been paid handsomely, or, as of late, not at all, for the work. Written for magazines, newspapers, at one point, I was working on three weekly columns at one time. These days, I’m down to one. I like it like that. Works for me. I got off on a web search for something or other, maybe it was from looking for that pager company’s website, or the cell phone or whatever, but I kept stumbling around, reading the first line of paragraph, then skipping down the page and reading a line here and a line there.
There were three distinct items I ran across, one was an article wherein the author, rather cutely, inserted some random words because he was sure that everyone was [url=http://www.x-entertainment.com/articles/0744/index.html]skimming and not actually reading the article itself. I found that funny because it was what I was doing, but I stopped long enough to peruse the random gibberish.
Then came a link from Pud’s [url=http://www.fuckedcompany.com]site, about [i]Shift[/i] magazine going under, and one of the articles linked from the link, was about a new movie and the blogger who’s getting to write a blog about the making of that movie.
Finally, there was the writer’s own [url=http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_02_27_archive.asp]journal, and as much as I enjoy that author’s works, I wonder if the blog is nothing more than a marketing tool. What I liked about that one entry was the way he described the organic process of developing a thematic element.
The sequence of the events was important, because that’s how I started to arrive my conclusions. Or, better yet, just ask questions. I’d hate to think that Willaim Gobson was just doing an online journal for the sake of marketing his book. That’s a terible thought. From what I’ve gathered asbout him, including a really old [i]Rolling Stone[/i] article, he is a writer. And from the content of the online stuff, he’s jsut randomly associating and not doing anything new or groudbreaking. Sometimes short, sometimes long, sometimes a few non sequitors, nothing unusual. The first guy was was writing for entertainment. Pure and simple. Doubt it’s a paid position. But the movie’s site? The target is obviously to generate a buzz – and make people go to movies.
Where was I going with this? I forgot. “You kids, quit throwing beer cans on my lawn.”