Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog
Jonathan Coulton sat in Gorilla Coffee in Brooklyn, his Apple PowerBook open before him, and began slogging through the day's e-mail. Coulton is 36 and shaggily handsome. In September 2005, he quit his job as a computer programmer and …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Times' profile lands at the point where the blogging-for-money story stops being abstract: Business 2.0 had already sketched the monetization mechanics in August 2006, and this piece puts a named face on them — a 36-year-old programmer who quit in September 2005 and now runs his music career through a daily-updated blog from a Brooklyn coffee shop.
It also fits the broader 2006-07 media thread of blogs turning from hobby to livelihood, alongside coverage of how kids and celebrities use the form (kids blogging their lives publicly) — the question shifting from "what is a blog" to "can a blog pay rent."
First-order effects
- Coulton's immediate position: his blog is both product and storefront, letting him sell music directly to readers without a label or distributor standing between him and his audience.
Second-order effects
- His case becomes a template other salaried programmers and creatives measure themselves against — if a daily blog can replace a paycheck, more mid-career quits into self-publishing follow.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, gatekeeping for creative careers migrates from institutions (labels, publishers, editors) to accumulated audience attention, with the individual blog functioning as a one-person media business.
The trend: Creative professionals are converting personal blogs from diaries into direct-to-audience businesses, trading institutional gatekeepers for the slow accumulation of a reader base.