Ticket to Write

Baldwin Louie — Fri, 25 Sep 1998 15:00:00 -0700

Personally, I like angle brackets. Here I sit on Labor Day weekend hacking HTML. No picnic. No road trip. No red-blooded sporting event. I engage in this bizarre behavior not because HTML is inherently wonderful, but because it lets me express a range of views and ideas that I simply couldn't convey any other way.

For me, that's much more than an abstraction. Twenty years ago I was a construction contractor banging nails and wrangling two-by-fours. Thanks to dumb luck and a little flexibility, I ended up in Tokyo working as a documentation editor for Fujitsu. It was a big break; however, my interest in artificial intelligence led to my real break.

I started writing. My first articles focused on Lisp and natural language processing. They offered amateur explanations for unsophisticated readers, but they did make it into print.

Since then, I've published in many journals and magazines - including the one you're reading now. I've gotten a lot of satisfaction out of it. And for you hardheaded realists who fail to appreciate the intangible, spiritual benefits of personal expression, consider this: With no formal education and no credentials, I managed to increase my salary tenfold in 10 years. Money wasn't my primary motivation, but this hockey-stick income ramp was a direct result.

I'm not suggesting writing as a surefire, get-rich-quick scheme. It's not. But it does offer real advantages: It allows you to broaden your professional networking area and gives you greater visibility in your field. And these advantages have increased dramatically with the advent of the Web. You laugh: Yes, the Web is chockablock with garbage. But as much of that crap is produced by corporations as it is by individuals.

In fact, anyone with a well-articulated point of view has a shot at finding an audience online. It doesn't have to be a huge audience, either. Forget for a moment those e-commerce plays and zillion dollar portal deals. Whatever your work involves - in terms of human resources, accounting, marketing or IT - garnering the attention of a few dozen professional colleagues can mean substantial gains. Think about how this has worked within companies. Skunk works were largely responsible for the rapid growth of intranets.

Ted Wolf Jr., now with iAtlas, was formerly senior strategist for electronic commerce at Dun & Bradstreet, where he built the company's first intranet. "Quite often," he says, "some person or group had an idea they wanted to gain support for, and the corporate Web became a perfect vector for building consensus - and ultimately for getting funded." Same thing on the wild and woolly World Wide Web, where connecting with like minds and potential supporters is just as possible - perhaps more so.

If you're looking for immediate revenue, you'll probably be disappointed. But there are other ways to make Web publishing pay. Sean Carton publishes the high-traffic Cool Tool of the Day page with a pointer back to his business, Carton Donofrio Interactive. Robert Seidman started his Online Insider newsletter four years ago and is now among the most sought-after analysts on the Internet. Randy Cassingham writes the electronic newsletter This Is True and has since "retired" from his day job on subscription upgrades and book sales. All these publications are free to readers, but they still generate substantial income for their authors.

But back to those angle brackets. For many, HTML is a serious showstopper. Noting this, several companies have recently launched sites intended to make Web publishing a lot easier. Examples include Yahoo (YHOO) Clubs, Excite (ATHM) Communities and DKA Scenes. All provide tools for content publishing and online audience development. In fact, I created Son of EGR this way for my client DKA. Had such facilities been available a few years ago, they might have saved me substantial time and hair-ripping frustration.

One advantage of Web publishing is particularly worth noting. Suppose you're writing an article for The Industry Standard, and its editor has allotted you a measly 740 words. No problem! At the end of the piece, simply point readers to the other 5,600 words you wrote on the subject. Like this: New Directions in Personal Publishing (www.rageboy.com/webwriting.html). Cool, huh?

Before creating Entropy Gradient Reversals, Christopher Locke developed Internet businesses for CMP, Mecklermedia, MCI and IBM (IBM). Reach him at clocke@panix.com.

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