I must not be an addict

[elfs]

I must not be an addict.

I've known this more or less my entire life. About the only thing I'm addicted to is information, the more fun the better. But some kinds of information are not fun to me, and among those kinds of information are "You just received an award for doing something that leads to a reward." Scoble describes it pretty well.

This makes it rather hard for me to finish, specifically, The Ellody Project. I don't "get" Foursquare, or Retweeting, or whatever. I care if my name gets out there, but only so I can engage with the ideas that surround it. I'm just not enough of a narcissist to care about how famous I am.

The Ellody Project is a social networking application built around erotic fiction. It's not enough to give people an alternative place to post erotic fiction; I had the idea of putting it right up front how widely read they were, what kinds of writings they were being associated with ("People who read your stuff also read..."), and even whether or not people read all the way to the end or not. Comments, reviews, and reviews of reviewers all provide a feedback loop between readers and writers that, theoretically, would lead to a vibrant community. A crowning glory would involve feeding that gratification with post-online publishing, in real paper, turning the act of writing erotica into the concrete possession of a physical object. (There would be two rewards, actually: one would be like World of Warcraft; you get published when you write enough erotica. The other would be a people's choice: the top n stories, where n is sufficient page count to fill 160-180 pages, would be in the annual anthology of "The Internet's Best Erotic Fiction 201x".)

My problem, though, is that while I know it would work, I just don't get it. Every day is too short to spend too much of it hanging out on Facebook, Twitter, and the gods only know where else, to gather together all the stuff about "Me, me, me, me too." So I don't really feel inspired to finish it.

Which, I suppose, is fine. It gives me time to work on my client's stuff.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Me, too. I could give a *damn* about seeing my name in lights. Seeing people using something I came up with, though... that's cool. Being able to look at something folks use and say, "I did that"... being the guy behind the scenes that makes stuff happen.... being the one that yells "SHOWTIME!" and seeing the lights go down and hearing the roar of the crowd as the band filters onto the stage.... feeling that energy and knowing that if it wasn't for you busting ass for the last four hours, it wouldn't happen... that's crack.