Read more about this formula and how I made it work for me in The day I said NO to writing for free on frogblog.

I’m a devoted fan, a certified geekette, a tech blogger… And already a Free client for Internet and TV.

I linked to Meet France’s New and Awesome Super Angels in my post Never Mind the Valley: Here’s Paris on ReadWriteWeb!

From the day I heard you were applying for the fourth license I was rooting for you. I knew the oligarchs would do whatever they could to keep you out of their club. Then you got the license! And I waited and waited for you to launch your mobile service, knowing that when it happened, I would make the switch, even if it meant buying my way out of my old contract…

I watched your live announcement of the Free Mobile services on TV. The whole thing! I had tears in my eyes when you got to the part about the low rates for poor people.

Read the rest of my letter to Free Mobile on frogblog.

“Are you on Twitter?”

If your answer is “No,” then this is for you. And if you’re over 45, chances are that’s your answer. But before you write off Twitter as a time suck, or a toy for kids, you should know that most Twitter users are between 26 and 44. Grownups like it, and for good reason.

For quite a while now, reading my Twitter timeline has been one of the most gratifying and important activities of my day. But back in 2008, this was what I had to say about it:

You know those sci-fi movies where some guy suddenly has the ability to read the minds of everyone around him and his eyes roll up in his head and he collapses in a heap, frothing at the ears and utterly insane because he can’t handle the flood of inanities? That’s why I’ve been avoiding Twitter.

At the time I wrote that, Twitter was still young, and the prompt its founders had come up with to get people to use it was “What are you doing?” In response to this we got a lot of sandwich eating and jogging in the early days. This drove many people nuts away.

Read the rest of How Twitter Became My Morning Paper on the Huffington Post.

It’s been a blast, and I’ll keep doing it because it’s a passion. But writing for these blogs is preaching to the choir.

I’ve decided it’s time to pay some attention to the flock. Despite everything I said (see my last few posts), I’ve gone ahead and started writing for HuffPo. It’s for a good cause (or at least that’s my rationalization). There’s a new channel — Huff/Post 50 — for Baby Boomers (which in the US means people born between 1946 and 1964), and I want to evangelize to this demographic on the joys of the Internet.

They need it. It will help make the second half of their lives more fulfilling and less lonely. It’s a resource for enrichment and expression and connection unlike anything any generation of seniors has ever had. And most of them don’t know how lucky they are. Yet.

A number of events big and small influenced my decision. My mother (71) buying an iPad and returning it because she couldn’t figure it out, then buying a Galaxy and returning it because she couldn’t figure it out, then deciding to try an iPad again, but to wait till I can show her how to use it. The fact that I got sick and have had to slow down a bit for the last year. A tweet I saw (just to name a few):

You should be able to buy a kit to build yourself an inner world to counteract the loneliness and isolation of old age.

As I said in my article The Web is a Room With a View, the Web is bursting with such kits. And blank canvases, and blank pages, and curio cabinets, as well as other people and other people’s gardens to pick flowers from. This is what I want them to know.

You can follow Huff/Post 50 on Twitter or subscribe to that channel by RSS. You can find all of my posts here and you can also subscribe to just my posts by RSS. They are published in HuffPo’s 50 and Tech channels.

Another part of the equation is the readers, who are very free with their likes (easy to be generous when it costs you nothing), but likes don’t pay the rent any more than exposure does.

Speaking of readers, permit me to draw your attention to Flattr, which I affectionately refer to as “likes with balls.” It’s a revolutionary idea, though most people don’t seem to have grasped that just yet. (Or maybe they have, and they’re just selfish and lazy. Or maybe they’ve lost their jobs and homes and are living in their vans and eating uncooked Top Ramens every day. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.)

Read the rest of If content is king, why are content creators slaves? on frogblog.

I think part of the problem is the concept of “blogger.” The general consensus (among the kind of people who think Amazon and Facebook are the Internet) seems to be that bloggers are ordinary people — pilots, housewives, nurses, mechanics — who just decided to start writing about whatever popped into their heads. People tend to place blogging in the hobby rather than the profession category, and they write off bloggers and blogs as amateurish and not to be taken seriously. I think traditional media and big online media capitalize on this perception to keep bloggers in a journalistic underclass.

Read the rest of Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? on frogblog.

So you have an idea for a group blog! Good for you. Who’s going to fill its pages? Writers. It’s the writers who are going to furnish the erudition and gravitas, or humor and hipness, or sexiness, or snarkiness, or whatever magic ingredients you need. And if you’re serious and have a clear vision for your blog, you’ll choose your writers carefully. (A startup founder doesn’t want just any hack building his/her platform.)

But if you let anyone who’ll work for free fill your blog with his blather, you’re screwing yourself right off the bat. You’ll get crap writing and a crap audience and crap advertisers (if any). Eventually, your dream of creating something special will die because your blog won’t be in the least bit exceptional because your content isn’t because your writers aren’t.

Read the rest of  Give me equity or give me a break on frogblog.

Instagram appeals to the idealistic part of me, that withered little corner of my soul that is some days barely clinging to life… Here’s why:

…Instagram is much more than a toy. There are two things about it that really make my heart swell. First, seeing pictures taken by people all over the world, being privy to moments friends and semi-friends and total strangers find exceptional enough to record and share, really makes you hyper aware of the beating heart of humanity on this planet. The other six-plus billion souls cease to be an abstraction when you see that somebody is living a moment in a dusty street in a Korean village or on a beach at sunset while you sleep or wash dishes. It’s exhilarating, extraordinarily moving and, on some level, reassuring. When the “other” becomes real, we’re less likely to destroy him.

Read the rest of this post on frogblog.

We do love our business cards, though. We’re still passing them out at even the most high-tech conferences. They’re little bits of art, tiny extensions of ourselves, especially if you’re lucky enough to not be a cog in the works of some giant corporation. 

When I get home from a conference and sift through the stacks of them I’ve collected, I feel the way I did after my elementary school Valentine’s Day card exchanges.

Now there are a couple of platforms you can use to create something resembling an online business card. I doubt they’ll replace the paper versions any time soon, but they can be fun and practical. Read about them in my post About.me and Flavors.me: Online Calling Cards on GigaOm Collaboration.

Right now (by invitation), any site owner can use TinyPay.me to create a branded C2C marketplace on which the site owner and visitors can sell products. Essentially, TinyPay.me is a build-your-own Etsy.

That’s exciting, but even more exciting is that early next year, it will be possible for site owners to use filters and tags to curate merchandise that is for sale on all of TinyPay.me, thus increasing their offering to their audiences with minimal effort. With this innovative distribution model, TinyPay.me will enable entrepreneurs to act as clearinghouses for products that appeal to their particular audiences. This platform may just be what long tail e-commerce has been waiting for.

Read the rest of my post (and get an invite, if there are any left) on ReadWriteWeb: TinyPay.me: The E-commerce Long Tail is Still Twitching.