I’ve recently become involved in a local movement to get a hackerspace started in Rochester, NY. We’ll see what happens. I may start blogging here and there about the effort, but for now, on to the next thing.
I definitely get distracted easily. I found a webcast of this dude who was making a twitter clone in rails. I KNOW I just blogged about how amazing Sinatra is for using Ruby, but I also am thoroughly engaged by using tons of gems and do-it-for-you rails accessories to make a quick and dirty web app. I know I need to stop thinking and start doing. The hackerspace organization has gotten in the ‘way’ to an extent, but I’m definitely thinking as I procrastinate about what to start on next. I should be involved in the project by the end of the week. If I’m not, I’m going to seriously reprimand myself for my procrastination. Honestly, I won’t get anywhere that way.
One thing I have worked on lately is my plethora of adsense sites. They are really more like internet litter, but I try to post interesting content and resourceful information to the web. I never do it without the idea of making money from it (with the exception of this site and my facebook account). I’m being honest.
So, one idea I have thought of recently is the very unoriginal concept of “a dollar per day.” If you can make a dollar per day via adsense with any combination of sites, or preferably a single site, you can make $365/year minimum. A domain costs $8/year. If you made a simple, informative sites on a niche market, you could make $300 in an hour. Yes, it’s not immediate. But, the upkeep of many of my sites which bring in a total of about $10/week right now, is less than 3 hours/year. Now, no one can predict what’s going to happen, what the idea of the ’semantic web’ will bring, how google will change its algorithms, what the future of seo (whitehat or blackhat) may be… But when I think about how much money I’m bringing in for how much work I’m doing, I can’t help but think, there is a place for every piece of internet litter.
Ok, so if I stop and think about this, and try to play the devil’s advocate with myself, I’d have to say: if you made a dollar a day for throwing trash out the window, think how much dirtier our streets would be. BUT you could also be that much richer for every piece of trash you threw, and you could spend that money doing good things, too! I don’t think of it as throwing out trash though, and not only just so I can sleep at night. My trash has SOME purpose and SOME resource, or it would never get any traffic (with my approach).
So it’s more like I’m throwing out fortune cookies. My sites are for gullible people in need of entertainment or too inexperienced to recognize that there are better resources with which you could spend your time contemplating your end goal.
*Sigh* I feel like a bad person when I write this out. 