'That's just crazy talk' 

Calacanis can be pretty funny. "No one knows for sure if this model of 'paying people for work' is gonna work. I mean, it's crazy to think that people could be paid to do a job and do it with integrity--that's just crazy talk. :-)"

Am I a chump? 

All the talk about earning money for what I've been doing for 10 years for free is starting to make me feel like a chump. But, looking at it another way, I've parlayed my freebee work into paychecks. I got my first day job in the online realm in 1997 based on hobby experience* and I've been working on the web, one way or another, ever since. I'm not rich or famous, but probably a lot of hobbyist bloggers and hackers would love to be in my shoes.

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* The gig was webmaster for the Indiana University Alumni Association. It wasn't that easy to find somebody who could write HTML and a little Perl in '97, but it also didn't hurt that the job lived in the publications department there, and I had a journalism degree (they gave me an AP Stylebook test!) Also probably didn't hurt that my future boss was ABD in literature and found out I read novels like Middlemarch for fun.

'Stand-in curmudgeon' 

Jerry Pournelle chats with the guys (Patrick Norton, David Prager, Doug Kaye and Chris Pirillo) on Twit.tv. Pournelle plays WOW but won't tell his character name. And he's a 13-year-old girl on MySpace?

Brava, Amanda 

Good for Amanda Congdon for setting the Wall Street Journal writer straight on an assumption that citizen media practitioners dream only of moving "up" to his big time MSM.

King and Irving say no to killing off the kid 

Harry Potter must live, prominent novelists say. So what's it their business? They get to vote? I'd like to see him marry Hermione and have them both settle in on the faculty of Hogwarts and live happily, too, but it's Rowling's call.

Yeah, I'm in the minority about Harry and Hermione. I keep hoping for one of those classic friends-become-more scenarios: When Harry Met Sally. David Copperfield, ultimately, dipshit. What's another example of that?