Sorry, eBay.
Yes, I know I was one of your MFBs (Most Frequent Bidders) for years. Yes, I am fully aware that in less than eighteen months I spent the equivalent of the price of a moderately used three-year-old Toyota Camry on obsolete laptop computers and palmtops. And yes, I haven’t forgotten the thrill, the top-of-the-roller-coaster excitement, the twisted, obsessive-compulsive, serotonin-boosting rush of last-second bidding on an ultra-rare Hewlett Packard Omnibook 430 subnotebook computer.
But blogging is more fun.
I have conducted a scientifically rigorous survey (of my own feelings and experiences) and have determined the following: (1) Blogging is a much more cost-effective time-waster than bidding on eBay. (2) Blogging is less likely to get one reprimanded at work (or fired) than bidding on eBay. (3) Blogging is less corrosive to one’s sense of self-esteem and self-control than bidding on eBay (and in fact may boost one’s self-esteem, rather than deplete it). (4) Blogging is far less likely to lead to family strife than bidding on eBay. (5) Thanks to modern statistical conveniences such as WordPress plug-ins, blogging is capable of feeding the same obsessive-compulsive bottomless-pit-of-neediness as bidding on eBay can (and much more cheaply). (6) Blogging is more environmentally responsible than purchasing mass quantities of collectible crap on eBay. (7) Blogging is a more satisfying, more enjoyable, and (possibly) more socially beneficial activity than bidding on eBay (I say “possibly” because I’m well aware that during those months when I was blowing wads of money out my ass on vintage laptops and palmtops, I was supporting dozens of small business enterprises all over the country, so I was not engaging in anti-social behavior; merely self-defeating behavior).
Nowadays, blogging is essentially dirt cheap, especially if one utilizes a platform like Blogger or WordPress to maintain a site oneself. Web hosting can either be free for the absolute basics or as little as six dollars a month for something a bit more elaborate. Registering and maintaining a domain name or two may add fifteen or twenty bucks a year to that sum. Believe you me, Bob, that’s a much easier cost to justify to She Who Generally Must Be Obeyed (otherwise known as the household’s financial manager, otherwise known as my wife) than the fifty to a hundred dollars a month I’d probably blow on laptops, laptop parts and peripherals, graphic novels, science fiction paraphernalia, film noir and foreign movie DVDs, jazz CDs, and action figures for the boys if I still had an active eBay habit. (Not to say I don’t occasionally fall off the eBay wagon and briefly return to my old, rabidly acquisitive ways, but it now happens a tiny percentage of the time it once did.) Plus, I cringe when I think about the amount of garbage my old eBay habit produced; back when I was receiving three or four vintage laptops per week, disposing of the packing materials (boxes, bubble wrap, and, worst of all, Styrofoam peanuts) often filled two or three trash cans. And the Styrofoam peanuts inevitably ended up hiding themselves under my chairs, sofas, and bed, scurrying between accumulations of static electricity like rabid mice.
When I started my blog at the beginning of this past July, I wondered whether I’d be able to keep it up beyond the first few months, or whether I’d run out of fresh material and subjects to blog about. Some weeks have proven more fecund for blogging than others, but I’ve seemed to suffer from no shortage of subjects within my fairly commodious wheelhouse, self-defined to include most things that interest me and that I know a reasonable amount about, or at least am able to intelligently link to (while adding a dash of relevant commentary). Some posts have been toss-offs, and others have taken hours to research and further hours to write. Nearly all have been lots of fun for me (otherwise I wouldn’t post them), and, to judge from the comments I’ve received, a number of posts have found appreciative readerships. Which makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, of course.
Then there is the simply wonderful Jetpack WordPress.com Stats plug-in program, which feeds my addiction to site viewership statistics. Anytime I want, I can check the health of my viewership and see whether my average daily page views are trending up or trending down. I can watch with amazement whenever I am linked to by one of the net’s “biggies” as my page views increase by the dozens every second (excitement which easily bests even that of winning a Poqet PC Prime in the final seconds of an eBay bidding war). I’ve learned from my stats that blog reading is primarily a worktime diversion; the nadir of my page views occurs every weekend or whenever there is a work holiday, and views shoot back up again the following Monday or the day after a holiday, independent of whatever I may have posted over the weekend or will post on that Monday. The highest volume hours for viewership during weekdays are between 8 A.M. Eastern time and 5 P.M. Pacific time. After that, people go about living their lives, playing their Nintendo games, and viewing their porn.
It has also been fascinating to see which of my posts and articles have been “evergreen” in their appeal. My articles on J. G. Ballard and the English riots have been popular, as well as my jokey posts on Sinead O’Connor auditioning for a role in a Fat White Vampire Blues movie. Several of my Friday Fun Links articles continue to get views, especially the ones on fascinating abandoned places and mail-order novelties. I’ve been very gratified to see that my series of articles on my obsessive collecting of vintage laptop and palmtop computers has found a steady readership; not much new gets written on those old but intriguing pieces of historic kit, so I’m happy that my fellow obsessives seem to be discovering my little memoir and enjoying it.
I must give tremendous praise to the worldwide collective of altruistic, hobby-minded, and/or profit-hopeful individuals who have offered WordPress to the general public (for free!) and who continue to update and improve the platform (for free!), one of several which make it possible for non-programmers like myself to create and update their own websites (for free!). I took a five-year hiatus between running my two websites. My first, Andrew Fox Books.com, I paid to have a web designer set up for me and update for me; it lasted from 2003 to 2006 and pretty much washed away when my web master’s home got washed away by Hurricane Katrina. My second, the site you are currently reading, was a DIY (do it yourself) project. What a difference in the quality of experience and pride of ownership! Maintaining that first site was a chore and a burden. I had to describe in exact detail what I wanted my web master to change or add, then pay him for his time, then check to see if his work measured up to my expectations. Nowhere in that description of our transaction is there room for “fun;” therefore, I updated my website much less frequently than I should have, which made me feel guilty and inadequate.
Now, however, when I want to add an article or a post, change my color scheme, plug in a plug-in, update my list of appearances or publications, or futz with my menus, I just sign in to WordPress and do it. No writing up directions for somebody else to follow. No payment of a fee, no matter how moderate. I just spend whatever time it takes, whether it be a few minutes or an hour or two, and my desires are fulfilled. Instantly, on screen, where I can immediately look at my changes. What wonderment! What satisfaction! Happy-happy joy-joy!
Even more eye-popping than comparing the personal information sharing technology of 2011 to 2006 is to look at the changes that have occurred since 1980. I choose 1980 because that was the year in which I first ventured into the world of personal information sharing, back then through a fanzine called The Dragon Reader that I put out with three friends in high school. It took us a couple of years to pull together that single fifty-page issue. We had to type up the stories and articles on typewriters (and all of us were terrible typists—you can tell by the clearly visible White-Out traces on the Xeroxed copies of the zine). We had to use Zip-A-Tone friction-transferrable letters to alternate font styles and sizes, applying them one letter at a time, and we had to cut and paste (manually cut and paste) our prose and our artwork to fit together on the pages. Then we had to utilize the slow, clunky Xerox machine in one of our father’s offices to make copies that we then needed to manually collate and staple the spines. To top things off, we even had to spend serious money just to find people to whom to give the fanzine for free. Three of us attended the 1980 World Science Fiction Convention, Noreascon II in Boston, and took about 50 copies of The Dragon Reader along to sell. We didn’t sell a one; we gave nearly all of them away, to just about anyone who could be bothered to take one. So we spent (or rather our parents spent) the cost of four air fares from Miami to Boston (we took along Preston Plous’s stepdad as a chaperone) and the cost of three nights at the Copley Plaza Hotel so we could give away 50 copies of our fanzine.
And now? My website and blog are modern version of that old fanzine. It costs me less than $90 a year to pay for web hosting services and to maintain my domain names. I’ve been publishing for less than half a year, and on a slow day I may get 200 page views (on a day I get linked to by a big-time website, I might end up with 7,000 page views). The magic of internet search engines brings readers to my virtual door from all over the world. Persons who share my niche interests (obsolete and vintage laptop computers; Bronze Age comics; giant monster movies; classic works of written and filmed science fiction; cult authors such as Barry Malzberg and J. G. Ballard; old roadside attractions; or raising a trio of little boys) eventually find me through Google or Bing. People who have never heard of me or my books stumble across my site because they are interested in some topic I may cover for just one post, such as fiction that deals with the 9/11 terror attacks or The Adventures of Augie March or the Fisker Karma hybrid performance sedan. Sometimes they end up taking a look around the rest of the site and like what they see, then bookmark the website and become regular readers. My site statistics plug-in tells me that about 1-2% of my visitors take a look at my descriptions of my books or click on the links to vendors. Maybe that percentage will go up in time. Maybe it won’t (in either case, I hope and expect that my average daily audience will grow). But most researchers of purchasing behavior agree that a potential purchaser requires five or six exposures to an item of interest before he or she “pulls the trigger” on a purchase. And it is a whole lot easier for me to accomplish those repeated exposures through maintaining this website and continuing to add interesting new content than it is through personally schlepping to bookstores or science fiction conventions (although those two activities have important ancillary benefits beyond simply performing public relations).
What an incredible world we live in, where capabilities that my young boys take for granted didn’t exist when I was in high school (or college, for that matter). Back in 1980, when I was manually cutting and pasting up my first science fiction fanzine, virtually no one in the science fiction community had begun to imagine the comparative ease with which I would be able to share my musings thirty-one years later. What a world…
