Inside blogger baseball: Kottke for sale

By Elizabeth on February 22, 2005 1:41 PM

[Or, a digression that will be of interest to 0.00003% of you. Overarching themes: blogging, self-referentiality, and...what was that word Bill Keller used to describe blogs? Oh, right. Circle-jerk.]

Famous Blogger (inasmuch as that’s not an oxymoron) Jason Kottke has quit his day job to blog full-time. He plans to support himself via reader donations, a lá Andrew Sullivan.

We weren’t going to post about this initially, because there’s only so much Internet to go around, and more Internet for Kottke means less Internet for us. Or: if we have two Internets and we give you one, we have only one Internet left—which is one less Internet than we started with. And frankly, we’d prefer two Internets.

At any rate, Kottke has apparently stumbled upon the little-known secret of commercial blogging: it’s incredibly lucrative. Most people don’t know this, because the existing for-profit blog network moguls go to great lengths to hide their wealth. To be fair, there was that incident last year where a couple of Soho residents en route to Balthazar were hit in the head by jewels and rare coins leaking out of the second floor windows of Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton’s apartment. That might have been a clue. Or maybe it was last year’s Fabergé easter egg hunt at Jason Calacanis’s place. (That may have been a little over the top.) Who knows, really?

We’d speculate more but we’re having the mediabistro offices gold-plated at the moment and we’re in the process of moving the huge wodges of cash that are cluttering up the fourth floor.

So, yeah. Feed the Kottke. Or just stick your tongue in his ear. Whatever.