Deranged Penguin

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,…
-“Howl,” Allen Ginsberg

This is what I thought when CubeSpace closed.

Cubespace was a fantastic place where community happened. A diverse and ever-changing cast of characters made it their home, and a lot of the rest of us dropped by every now and then for events. Stuff happened there. Silly stuff, serious stuff. When we lost it, we lost a vital anchor, a gravity well that kept loose affiliations from becoming whatever-happened-tos. It sucked.

This is not to say that there aren’t efforts afoot to replace the gap. But I’m going to go ahead and stake a claim. Any revenues generated by this blog’s advertising, affiliate links, and my ijango thingie, will be split 50/50 between myself and the PDX tech community. Micro-grants for open source projects, sponsorship of events, whatever. I don’t anticipate that I’ll make a zeelion dollars, but I will make some, and what I make I’ll share.

Why iJango

Because it actually looks like it could be useful. It’s a dashboard, a la iGoogle, for folks to keep track of social networking sites, the weather, whatever else that interests them. It has a “shopping” tab that links to actual retailers that sell actual things – not Acai megashakes or ebooks on how to sell ebooks. Someone buys something from the shopping tab, I get a cut. You can get a cut, too, by signing up to be an Independent Representative. That’s $50 of your money. You can be super-ambitious and sign up as a director (this is actually the only option today – representative signups start when the site launches tomorrow). That’s more – $170 and a monthly “administration fee.” Yes, it’s MLM. You know who makes millions at MLM? The people who start them. I don’t want to make millions. I don’t want to coach you. I don’t want to do any of the “UR Doing it Wrong” bullshit that pisses me off every day on Twitter. I want to make pin money for the Portland tech community. I have been assured by my accountant and a lawyer buddy of mine that iJango’s Terms of Service and compensation plan are legitimate. My accountant went so far as to say that people who really grind on MLM can make a lot of money. I think 99% of the time, those people are assholes.

Two things make it “okay” in my head: first, there’s no hard sell. You’re just shifting your spending dollars to a different channel. You’re being referred to reputable retailers in a way that gives Deranged Penguin a cut. If you don’t want to do any of the MLM nonsense, don’t. Sign up for free as a registered customer tomorrow, August 1st. If you ever need to buy something, look on iJango first. That commission will come here and you’ll be helping me sponsor events. You’ll be helping coders with an idea and bills to pay. You’ll be “buying scrip” for the Portland tech community.

The second thing is something that I constantly forget about the rest of the world: they know about all this internet stuff but they’re not using TweetDeck, or Yahoo! Pipes, or Netvibes, or any of it. It’s just a mass of junk to them. If they’re lucky, they’ve customized a homepage of some type. The thing about iJango is that it really does appear (and bear in mind I haven’t gotten to truly use the site) to make sense of social media for people who want it all in one place. People who are not going to set up multiple tabs on their browser. People like my mom. Will these people, once they are nestled in the warm embrace of a customized iJango homepage, ever buy anything off the shopping tab? I dunno. But even if all we see from iJango is “it doesn’t suck,” we might still be improving the user experience for our friends and neighbors that are not ubergeeks.

So, assuming it does better than not sucking, I don’t see a downside to using it as a sort of affiliate clearinghouse. If I end up standing astride a massive engine of ecommerce, I’ll be sure to let you know.

And, of course, Powell’s

You can also shop at Powell’s using my partner link. I’ll be doing more with this as we go.

The Counsel of Giving Away Money

I’d also like to push sponsorship and micro-grant decisions to a board of trusted people. We do not, at the moment, have a process. We also have no money. However, if you want to be in on the Making of the Rules to Give Away Money, you should consider applying for The Counsel of Giving Away Money. Email Deranged Penguin to let me know.

That’s all I can think of right now. High flipper.