rianjs.net

What a couple of weeks. 4 exams (highest grade in the class on two of the four!), catching up with old friends, paying off all credit card debt, fixing technical problems with my photo gallery and OnThePharm.

Still trying to figure out what to do with my life, though. However I'm starting to narrow it down, and I get the feeling that starting my own business is going to be one of the things I do regardless of whether or not I continue my education at the graduate or professional level.

Options on the table for after graduation:

• MBA: Relatively inexpensive, and not especially time consuming. Unlimited upside, and would teach me skills I don't currently have. Could go anywhere from here.
• PharmD
• Get a job: Thinking technical writer of some kind. Preferably medical stuff.
• Start my own business: Many options on the table here; I have two in mind specifically. One with David, and one more along the writing side of things, but that would require getting about three other people to go along with it.
• A combination: MBA + small business; PharmD + writing business; writer + small business; writer + writing business.

Who the hell knows. I feel like I'm starting to settle — there aren't quite as many possibilities up in the air at this point as there were 6-12 months ago. I like the idea of getting my MBA because it's relatively inexpensive, and it provides a good fallback point should the side ventures go awry. I have enough work experience to go right into it without needing to get a job first, which is fortunate. Thank goodness for in-state tuition…

I would also like to start writing for Ars again. Not daily writing, but something like a monthly feature article about something I've been doing a lot of thinking and reading about. I have an outline for my first article already written. I just need to flesh it out which I hope to work on today.

NaNoWriMo

November is almost here, which means NaNoWriMo is write around the corner. (Tee hee) I've been writing character outlines off and on this week for a story that's been kicking around in my head for a few months now. Given its "supernatural"-esque flavor, I've been doing some new thinking about how people with extraordinary abilities might fit into and interact with an ordinary environment. No, not like Heroes, which is getting progressively lamer with the time-arc plotholes that are used WAY too often as Deus Ex Machina mechanisms. F that crap. You start messing with time travel, and you've created a recipe for a world of hurt as a writer. The possibility for plotline chaos increasing exponentially and just makes things… messy.

I'm trying to come up with some history that I can use as an invisible framework, and also thinking about words themselves. Take the word "telepath" for example. That's a relatively new word. What might someone with that ability have been called 300 years ago? What about someone with telekinesis? Before the "tele-" prefix, what did we have to describe spooky action at a distance? Witchcraft, obviously, but I think that's too blunt a word to be useful or interesting. And in a world with a rich history of physical and mental "superpowers," witchcraft probably doesn't apply because the supernatural would cease to be supernatural and instead would be entirely ordinary…

So these are some of the things I've been thinking about. I've participated in NaNoWriMo three times now in the last seven years, and I'd like to do it again, and I think I'm at a point in my life where this is a realistic possibility. I'm pretty excited, but I need to start working on a plot outline if I am to be successful.

I chuckle every now and again when I see the MSM reporting on blogs. The usual suspects almost always turn up: TechCrunch, the HuffPo, GigaOM, BuzzMachine — as well as a smattering of the hot blogs du jour. This time it was Steve Rubel's MicroPersuasion and Passive Aggressive Notes.

I must confess some incredulity, because I have never seen Ars Technica mentioned in a story that focuses specifically on blogs. This despite being relegated to merely a "blog" (albeit acknowledged as an influential one) most of the time by the mainstream media when they reference a story that Ars breaks.

Now, the HuffPo is a huge website. Probably a little bigger than Ars with 5.7M unique readers per month. TechCrunch is markedly smaller, and GigaOM is smaller still (1.37M pageviews/month or so).

It makes me wonder why these particular blogs are chosen. Is it because the stories about blogs are by their nature more noise than substance? Indeed these stories are often widely hyped when they hit and will make their way around the 'sphere several times before disappearing like yesterday's newspaper. (The blogosphere echochamber at its finest.) Ars seems to be anti-hype most of the time. It's been known to take a somewhat dim and sometimes even contrarian view to what's hot in the blogosphere this week — "The Cloud!", death by blogging! — if indeed what the blogosphere is focusing on this week is even worth talking about at all. (Usually it's not.)

So here are some sites that Business Week may want to think about including, because these sites are the real movers and shakers in the Internet publishing world. This list is by no means comprehensive, and I make no comments about their content or quality of the sites, only their size. This list isn't sorted in any meaningful way:

• High-Def digest: ~7.23M
• Destructoid: ~4.25M
• Gamersyde: ~5.17M
• SB Nation: ~8.76M
• Celebrity Baby Blog: ~8.64M
• Confessions of a Pioneer Woman: ~6.05M
• Fark: ~37.09M
• BoingBoing: ~6.93M
• SeriousWheels: ~9.05M

For comparison, TechCrunch sits at ~7.5M pageviews per month, and Ars Technica sits at ~30M.

I've been learning this the hard way: experience. I can't tell you how often in the last six months I've chopped out huge portions of blog entries that seemed like they were trying too hard, or detracted from the overall entry itself. I had a paragraph and a half in this entry, for example, that I simply had to remove because it took something away from the whole. Even though I really wanted to share a second video, it would have made the main thrust of the entry less impactful.

Scott Adams at the Dilbert Blog writes this entry that's spot-on. Unfortunately even though you've read the article, it probably won't make you a better writer right away. Most writing lessons are learned by beating your head against the wall, in my experience. But it could also be that I'm just stubborn…

The main technique is keeping things simple. Simple writing is persuasive. A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences. Don't fight it.

Simple means getting rid of extra words. Don't write, "He was very happy" when you can write "He was happy." You think the word "very" adds something. It doesn't. Prune your sentences.

I'm convinced that most people can't write well, and don't care about writing well because their high school English classes facilitated the opposite. The primary lessons learned there were, "more is better" and "literature is boring."

The other, more subtle points like word selection to create tone and setting should only be attempted after the basics of simple writing are assimilated. (Note that I didn't say mastered. )

So I'm not in pharmacy school at the moment — though I hope to return in Fall 2007 — so I'm taking courses at UMass Lowell. I've changed majors to psych just to make it easy in the meantime. Anyway, I wasn't expecting it to be quite this easy. I haven't taken courses that required so little effort since I was in early high school. While I am getting mostly As, I find myself dissatisfied because the work is so utterly unchallenging.

Fast forward to yesterday morning around 7.30am: I discovered yesterday that I had a research paper due today by 11.59pm. Between then and midnight tonight I'm scheduled for 15 hours on the Pharm. Oops. Anyway, of the 5 topics on the list, the one that seemed the least interesting at first glance ended up being the most interesting upon closer inspection, and now I find myself biting into a fairly information-dense biochemistry paper discussing the viability of using ADAM 12 — a disintegrin-containing metalloprotease — as a breast cancer screening test. Since it can be isolated in urine, it's far less invasive than other tests.

It's actually been pretty fun so far. I'm feeling the crunch (been up since 4am), which is not something I've felt in quite a little while, and it's invigorating. The material is pretty cool, and it's relevant to medicine and pharmacy, and since that's what I'm truly interested in, it's been a nice breath of fresh air.

It's also nice to have something challenging to sink my teeth into for a change.

One of the modules I have on my Personalized Google Homepage is the Quote of the Day. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's interesting, sometimes it's stupid. And sometimes it speaks to me. This is one of those rare times.

We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.

- Frank Tibolt

As I writer, I've found that to be more true than almost anything else.

QOTD, quote of the day, Frank Tibolt

When I'm writing, I'm very conscientious of the words of I'm using. Generally, I choose each word specifically for a reason. As I'm taking online courses, most of the work is written, which is good for me. I don't have to drive to class 3 days a week and sit and be bored out of my tree. It's a lot more efficient to sit at home and do the reading and writing all at once. 3 hours of work condensed into 1.

Anyway, I read other people's work sometimes — it's encouraged — and sometimes I wonder if people know what the words they're using actually mean. In OS X, there's a little dictionary built-in. If I don't know all of the subtleties behind a given word, I won't use it, or I'll look it up just to be sure. And then I'll re-work the sentence or paragraph until I like it. (Blog entries excluded sometimes. ) There are similar tools for Windows. And about a million Internet dictionaries on top of that.

My writing is a lot like my speaking. I've been told in the past that I speak "like a book" — whatever that means. I've always taken it as a compliment because I choose my words carefully both in speech and writing, and I strive to have my writing be as much "like me" as possible. I try to be authentic.

But when you read papers — even at the college level — it becomes apparent that people cannot write nearly as coherently as they can usually speak. They use words that they wouldn't if they were talking. This is bad because it's usually painfully obvious. It's okay to be plain-spoken. You don't need to have a Shakespearean vocabulary to get your point across; no one's going to look down on you for not using flowerly language. Yeah you might not be able to be a "professional writer" — whatever that means these days — but you won't look dumb, either.

This begs the question… why not simply speak your mind on something and then transcribe what you've said? It's real, it's usually not bad, and it's probably quicker than trying to bridge that disconnect between speech and written communication that seems to exist in some people — and it'll sound genuine AND intelligent.

Really, it's just better.

communication

It's been a long time since I've gone a full 24 hours without having any AdSense clicks on any of the 3 sites I run. I don't really mind since I've demolished my earnings goals for the month, but I thought it was interesting anyway.

In fact, it hasn't happened since… June 24. Hah!

I suppose that's actually pretty good for just getting started. OTP, as usual, remains my biggest earner by far, despite having been slashdotted here on rianjs.net. Now that IS surprising, even though tech-savvy traffic typically doesn't click on advertisements.

AdSense

Hey Eric, could you put in a good word for me with the folks over at the WaPo's new Blogroll project for OnThePharm. OK THX. <3

I've been doing some back-of-the-envelope math lately, based on estimations after my recent slashdotting, calculating, on average, how much a page impression is worth based on Google AdSense from a relatively tech-savvy demographic. I've told some of my close friends my plans for world dominationbuilding a media empire (something I'll eventually expound upon here), and I've calculated that with minor AdSense optimization and a decent amount of tech-savvy readers (that tend to not click ads), a page impression is worth $0.0033495.

Based on my calculations (number of posts + infrastructure costs + authors + misc.) I need $66,240 to operate for 12 months, assuming I didn't make a single cent in advertising revenue, and figure an extra $3,000 for expenses I didn't think of.

Assuming a page is worth that fraction of a cent, I'd need 1.6 million page views to break even, assuming Google AdSense was my only source of revenue. (Which it wouldn't be, but I'm figuring worst-case scenario.)

Oddly enough, technology infrastructure at this point is but a drop in the bucket compared to what paying good writers would cost, so it would make no sense to skimp on the backend. Serving pages on a robust platform costs a fraction of a fraction of a cent in an all-in-one package that most dedicated server packages offer. (The machine is yours to serve as many pages as your bandwidth will allow.) Colocation, on the other hand, tends to charge more in terms of bandwidth. In other words, 1GB of colo bandwidth tends to cost more than 1GB of dedicated server bandwidth thanks to overselling. Colo customers tend to have a better handle on how much bandwidth they'll use in a given month — in theory, anyway.

Fun, fun.

Money, entrepreneurship, writing, start-ups, business, media, Internet, AdSense