News You Can Bruise for 2004 October 20

I wrote a piece of software that is really neat. I think it's in the top quartile of the class of application that people could have turned into software companies back in 1999. I don't know anything about starting software companies, and it's not 1999, but I still think there's some way to make money off of it. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to distribute it even if I give up hopes of monetary gain. I'm hoping my readers can help.

My original plan was I would host it and let people have accounts on it, but as it turns out, it requires a lot of processing time to keep one user happy. (I have optimized this a lot but it's still pretty high.) I can't host it for more than ten or twenty people without buying a dedicated server, and a dedicated server will probably only let me go up to a couple hundred users. I don't want to enter the realm of running dedicated servers because that means the project has taken over my life, and unless it's my actual job to run the project I don't like that.

That's the one option. Now, this is a piece of software that sometimes reads other people's web pages. If somehow I got it all set up and everyone in the world were using it, it would use up about as much of your average web page author's bandwidth as, say, Technorati does. This I could live with. On the other hand, if I gave it out as open source and n people ran their own instances of it, it would be like creating n/k Technoratis for some fairly large k. If n got bigger than k I would have unleashed a monster upon the world. A monster! Usually you can count on nobody caring about the software you release, but I don't want to take that risk. The people I've shown this to really like it.

My current inclination is to just write a paper detailing all my secrets and making this someone else's problem, or at least making me look like a visionary when someone else comes up with the same idea. My ideal outcome would be selling the idea and the current implementation to someone, where I get some money up front and they make a lot more money by setting up servers and taking subscriptions and generally letting the project take over their life. I know that's not likely to happen. What's the next best option?

My readers exact a heavy toll for their (no doubt forthcoming) advice on the dilemma expounded upon in my previous entry, by... giving me stuff to post. First we have two reader-submitted Google Memewatches (Google Memeswatch?). * don't * people from Kevan, who informs me that the actual, far-too-precious name for a Google Memewatch is a "snowclone"; and will the real * please stand up, from the usual gang of idiots.

Second: I have been overwhelmed with links to this story, reinforcing my delusion that NYCB is the preeminent mola mola weblog, when the fact is that I am just the preeminent mola mola obsessive. A huge mola mola has washed up on the shores of New Zealand. Why? Perhaps because of Joe Mahoney's dark secret. I don't know; maybe it was a bodyboarding accident.

1 year since I turned on NYCB comments. Grep shows that NYCB has since accumulated almost 1000 comments, and the other weblogs on this site about 3000 more (Rachel is in second place with about 750 comments). Amazingly I have grown to like comments on my weblog; I had my doubts initially, but I must admit that this is the nicest tar pit I've ever sunk into. It's more like a refreshing tar bath.

Ever since Sumana first said "frog blog", people have continued to create weblogs called "frog blog". Recently we saw a frog blog that starred Demon Dog! Only they call him the Quiet Coyote, and his job is not to show up and commiserate with you when you are bored or annoyed, but to show up and silently express his Puritan disapproval of your noisiness. He is quiet; why can't you be?

Maybe Demon Dog is Quiet Coyote's evil brother. Or I could see them in an Odd Couple type matchup.