Out of the Inkwell

Well, it’s time to get back to business and one of my resolutions is to blog much more frequently.

I should point out there are some changes here at Out of the Inkwell. There is a revised link list with a bunch of additions and some deletions. I’m sure some sharp-eyed readers will note the Pioneer Valley Central logo is gone. I’ve officially filed that effort under noble, but failed, experiments.

Since the collaborative blogging attempt received some nice press in The Valley Advocate, I was hopeful it was going to succeed. It didn’t for a variety of reasons, not the least of which that life got into the way. In my own case, I wanted to blog on local subjects for it, but I was too frequently compelled to write about other things here other than Springfield area news. I just thought my entries wouldn’t fit into the Pioneer Valley format.

Of course it didn’t help that one of the key members of the group decided to tell the Advocate he thought it was going to fail but wanted to be a part of it if it succeeded! As I get older I tolerate stabs in the back much less than when I was a beardless youth. Of course, he wanted to be my friend on Facebook. I said, “No.”

I continue to believe that such an idea has validity, but the truth is everyone wants to make money off his or her content, but the question is how on the Web? For any such enterprise to succeed, one needs to have a marketing budget in place to drive readers to the site as well as figure out a way to get money from subscriptions or advertising. We weren’t prepared to tackle such issues in the way they demanded.

Frankly I think the best way is to take up the porn site model – offer so much content for free and then ask for a subscription for more content. The content has to be compelling enough to warrant a subscription though and the price has to be low enough for people to sign up.

I think about this stuff a lot, as I would like to find that magic formula to transmute the lead of the Web into gold. I’ve not found it yet.