Makers - You and Me

I've started reading Cory Doctorow's Makers. It all started when listening to This Week in Tech (TWIT) I heard Doctorow speak about a subject he's very passionate about. I had read a few of his books before, all free downloads from Craphound.com. Hearing him again made me look at books he recently posted. He makes ebook versions of his books available for free and makes money off the book sales. It may seem counterintuitive to do that, but he has a following and he was able to make it work.

Anyway, reading the first 60 or so pages has already made an impression on me. So much so that my head's has been buzzing with ideas, half-baked all of them, of how to create value out of ideas. I studied entrepreneurship in college and I know the value of a good idea. But tradition has it that creating means making a tangible product you could sell. Reading Makers has made me realize that it doesn't have to be a product per se. An idea has an intrinsic value in itself and to monetize that is where you get a profit from. Whether or not its commercially viable is up to the public but an idea you have is bound to be useful to someone somewhere. Sounds familiar to me. It's actually one of the reason why I blog. My thoughts may not hold much value for you but they may be to someone else.

Moving along those thoughts, I find my self wanting to move my blog out of Blogger. I haven't really been taking it seriously, posting snippets of my life and my opinion from time to time. I had an incident a few weeks back where my personal blog was tagged as spam by a bot. The appeals process took at least 2 weeks, but that made me realize that I valued the content of my personal blog so much. I want to protect it. Moving to hosted space, I could secure that data as long as I was willing to pay for it. The crux is that it has to be self-sustaining. So why not get serious with monetizing one of them to subsidize the personal blogs, right?

I've been talking to an old friend who offered to host my blog for a very friendly price. I just need to iron out a few things to make it work, mostly the logistics of moving my data over and sourcing the money I need to pay for the service.

I created something when I started blogging. It is valuable to me, and if my belief holds true, it is of value to someone else. I will make the move and in doing so I want to create more to continue doing what I love to do - write. Makers. We are all creators in our own small way. We should realize that is valuable, more than we ever seem to truly think.