Six Apart President Mena Trott announced the Six Apart professional network yesterday, using these words:
If you're interested in making money with weblogs, making cool tools, or just making your work with weblogs easier, the Professional Network is designed for you.
Well, as Adam Smith famously said:
People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise prices.
so it wasn't surprising when the some of the first posts to the new Six Apart professional network mailing list were about how much to charge for doing Movable Type work for clients. Six Apart's response? Anil posted a list FAQ which said in part:
discussions of specific costs or rates for services, details of legal contracts or obligations, or human resources issues are not appropriate for the list1
If weblog professionals can't use the professional network to talk about how to make money from MovableType, what kind of network is it? Other than technical details, what else would weblog professional talk about? Why are some of the most popular medical journals those that concern themselves with Medical Economics. While I am not arguing that Six Apart should be helping people fix prices, if you are going to set up a network for professionals to make money, the professionals have to be able to talk about how to make money.
I'm sorry if it seems like I am picking on Six Apart in general or Anil in particular -- some would say that it is like shooting baby squirrels in a barrel. I'm not trying to. I really wish them the best. But I wish they would stop going out of their way to make it so easy for their detractors to find fault with them, or so hard for their friends to defend them.
1 Defying weblog conventions, but respecting Anil's wishes, I haven't linked directly to the mailing list postings or the FAQ, by they are readily viewable on Six Apart's website with a little digging.
Posted by Geodog at September 1, 2004 08:11 PM | TrackBackMy apologies, but my web hoster has turned off commenting, due to a flood of obscene spam bringing the server to its knees. I hope to have this weblog transitioned over to Wordpress in the near future, so that I can have commenting up and working again. Until then, please feel free to send me your comments via my email contact form.. Please ignore everything below this comment.
Aw, c'mon Tim. "discussions of specific costs or rates for services, details of legal contracts or obligations, or human resources issues are not appropriate for the list".
Do you think a mailing list with members in the United Arab Emirates and the United States could have any kind of reasonable discussion about what a fair rate is to charge for developing an application on top of Movable Type? It's just silly. Every mailing list in the world has a guideline saying "please don't talk specific numbers".
webdesign-L, one of the most venerated (and, when Steve Champeon ran it, best-moderated) mailing lists on the web has a guidelines page:
http://webdesign-l.com/policies/
Avoid discussions on pricing.
There are a wide range of expertise, skill sets and geographic areas represented on this list. What you should charge for your services is unlikely to be representative of what others should charge and vice versa. Moreover, many of us live in areas where there are strict laws that classify such discussion as “collusion” and prohibit it (as, for example, the U.S. does).
Talking about specific pricing information *reduces* the likelihood of conversations about how people actually make money. Value is created (and therefore, livelihoods are made) when people do something unique, creative, specially focused, or extremely well executed. The list will (and already has, from what I've heard) inspired people to do new things with our tools, and those creative new ideas will help them create value and make money.
"Other than technical details, what else would weblog professional talk about?" How about:
* What are the creative ways in which you position Movable Type against more expensive content management systems when you're competing for a job?
* What web services are useful to hook into Movable Type when I want to add functionality to a site?
* What techniques have you used to show blogging's effectiveness in driving repeat traffic to a business website?
Those all seem universally applicable, won't be as likely to vary (unlike the difference in consulting rates between Peoria and Pyongyang) and help make people better at their careers.
As I've said before, I find the phrase "baby squirrels" dismissive and annoying. We're a serious software company, and a damned good one. I am more than glad to take constructive criticism in the vein that it's intended, but I'd find it easier to believe that you're in the friend camp than the detractor camp if I didn't see a concerted effort to take different quotes out of context and apply them in a situation that puts them in a bad light.
Preserving context, by the way, is exactly why I asked people not to link to mailing list conversations from their blogs. I fully understand how blogs work, and one of the tendencies we all have is to gang up on someone before we've heard the full story.
If you'd like to critique what I'm doing, what Six Apart does, or what anybody of interest to the weblog community does, I've created something of a howto that I think is useful:
http://www.dashes.com/anil/2004/06/27/learning_from_e
I'm somewhat consciously modeling the Six Apart Professional Network after communities which I've participated in or found useful, from the Microsoft Developer Network to the PHP community that Zend manages, to efforts like java.net and various O'Reilly sites. I also think it's interesting to watch how third parties have sprung up to sell accessories for the iPod or customizations for Tivo.
As long as I'm getting unsolicited critiques, I'd love a comparison of our efforts thus far (and our intended future efforts) with those other successful efforts. I'm well aware we're not perfect, but the goal was to get something up and running that would be in a position to be improved. I think we've succeeded, especially judging by the response of network members, and I hope things get even better going forward.
Posted by: Anil on September 1, 2004 11:40 PMAnil,
Thanks for the lengthy and detailed comments, as well as the link to http://webdesign-l.com/policies/, which I had never seen before. I've been noodling on them for a while.
I hope that I have answered your comments in my follow-up post, http://www.thebishop.net/geodog/archives/2004/09/16/mena_trott_answers_6as_critics_and_geodog_signs_off_on_criticism.html. If not, feel free to comment again. I do appreciate it that you listen and talk with your critics, whether you feel they are friendly or not.
Thanks,
Tim