If you want to know what mistake Matt felt he made, you only need to read his own comments. Hint: it’s not the spamming.

From Matt’s blog: “The articles hosted content thing was just a short-term experiment, an interesting idea (original and relevant Wikipedia-type content on the site) that was badly implemented. As an experiment it could have been conducted much better than it was. The content should have been more topical to WP issue, I should have kept up with the content that was going up, the links should have never had the overflow CSS, and I should have discussed it with more people. Each was a mistake and they combined badly — I’m very sorry.”

Please note that nowhere he admits that spamming is wrong; to the contrary, he seems quite OK with it. The mistake he made, is that he spammed the wrong way–as if there is a right way to spam!

He very much reminds me of the sort of people who say “I am sorry I got caught” instead of “I am sorry that I did wrong”.

A Dutch bishop once got into a furore when he suggested that a beggar who steals bread to survive is doing nothing wrong in the eye of God. A lot of mom-and-pop shops, who are having a hard enough time themselves, did not particularly care for that sentiment. However, I can sort of see the bishop’s point.

Would Matt Mullenweg have starved if he had not spammed? No, he just would have had to stop working on or hosting WordPress. Big deal.

It is not like he never got anything for free. The web, the Apache web server, the PHP language, the MySQL database, all these things would have cost Mullenweg a lifetime to develop or billions of dollars to pay if he had not gotten them for free.

In case you figure that spam is only a minor evil: I disagree. In case you figure that spam has nothing to do with crime: think again. Spammers are heavily linked to organised crime.

Anyway, I think the ethical side of what Mullenweg did needs to be kept separate from what happens to WordPress. WordPress.org is tainted. It can no longer be trusted. IMO, at this point a trusted entity like the FSF needs to step in and take over. Fork the project, give it another name, and take it from there.

“with a paying readership of a few hundered”

That’s Irish spelling, I s’pose.

“Why pay for the cow when you can get the milk free”.

But the problem, although endemically systemic, is simply that people that pay $40/$50 a month for broadband are the Medici’s of the world.. As I said at Rogers’ blog (http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/comment/2532#3789), I’d (rarely) pay for good blogging (mebbe $1 a month or $10 a year)…

Not enough for some to live off. But some could and others could get some part-time money for part-time work with a paying readership of a few hundered… And it’d be a good start to a cottage industry. Especially since there’s a direct link between the creative and the value to the reader’s as opposed to the indirect method of advertising.

(And yeah, that’d imply that the best thing is to support non-free software as well.)

From Dept. of Small Nits:

“and becuase [sic] there is no existing business model to follow”

Blogging is an incredibly effective way to begin and maintain a conversation with a field of potential business prospects, but it does not come with any sort of template for business models. There is the potential for profitable business, but one has to work out what the exchange is going to be first.

I tend to agree with Matthew White in that I consider creative output to be relatively useless unless somebody needs it. Do what people need and will PAY for and you have the beginning of a valid business model.

You still have to do it profitably, and you have to promote like crazy to attract business, but there is a way to support yourself if you consider your blog as a means to advertise, rather than the product itself.

Hugh Macleod seems to be making progress in this direction and it will be instructive to watch how he does as time goes on. He is also running ads, which may not be appropriate for all bloggers.

My take on blog advertising is that paid space on a selected blog is a good investment. Exchanging blog ads with related sites is an even better investment. It is easy to track the traffic coming from these sites and to determine the effect of copy changes on orders placed.

“Most people go around in life trying to sell what they can make. Instead, you should make what you can sell. In fact, go sell shoes - because everybody wants them.”

Stop trying to foist the result of your creativity on the world. Be creative for a purpose that solves a need which someone is willing to pay for, or else realise that you’re not being creative - you’re just consuming time - like watching TV.

(I wrote a followup post to this but being new to blogging I couldn’t work out how to do a trackback. If someone could teach me that would be great.)