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Money for nothing
Back when anything with a dot-com on it was like a wishing well for venture capitalists, I was fond of writing that before too long, the Internet would cease to be an vital or even interesting topic for discussion. My reasoning was that the Internet would soon become like the telephone system, i.e. it would just be there, like it had been around forever, and everyone would take it for granted. Hah! How many telephone magazines can you name, anyway?

No, the thing would be, what can you do with it. You call someone and spread some news. 911 is invented. Telemarketing thrives. People get beepers. Cell phones are everywhere. Everyone talks everywhere, all the time. But all this happened on top of the thing itself. A lot of people got filthy rich off the phone company, one way or another, but phones themselves aren't about money, are they? Sure, if you're a realtor or maybe a salesman, but you know what I mean.

Chicks for free
In return for office space and an ISDN line, I'm doing some Web work for a Taos, New Mexico monthly newspaper called Horse Fly. The site is very limited in scope at the moment, but I'm adding content and features all the time. Soon it may even be slick enough to brag about, but first I have to get straight with Dreamweaver and that awful black highlighting. (There must be a pref for that, but I haven't found it yet.)

Until a couple of weeks ago the paper's Web site was one of those packaged deals, a script-driven template site a smart, fast-talking Texan has sold to small town newspapers all over America. If your local paper's site has a tight stack of beveled rectangular navigation buttons in the upper left hand corner and really long page titles, that's the outfit.

The packaged Web sites work, all right, allowing reporters and editors with absolutely no knowledge of HTML to upload stories, pictures, and ads. The system even produces single-page Web sites for advertisers, and these are about what you'd expect from an automated process. The cost seems set to match the customer, but this particular arrangement ran $200/month for hosting on top of a substantial fee up front for leasing the service. At any rate, as the people I was lining up with were in the process of getting disentangled from the deal, I had a chance to talk to the boss (a totally fine fellow, you understand). His basic pitch was that if we would only let him send people here to show us "how to sell the ads on the Web site," we couldn't fail. A little newspaper in Texas with one of these contraptions was supposedly pulling in $50,000 a year from online advertising. "What's the point of having a Web site if it doesn't make money?" he repeated frequently.

Industrial disease
When I finally had a chance to speak, the words came easily, calmly, and steadily. Why, there were lots of reasons to have a Web site besides to make money. Most of the ones I cited were idealistic oldies but goodies, to be sure, but the opportunity to sermonize comes seldom enough and must be seized! It worked, of course: when I was finished, he heaved a sigh and signed off.

I know what he feels like. He figured he was talking to someone from another planet and so did I. All I could think about was a universe of ugly Web sites making fistfuls of money, which eventually elicited a vision of me raising goats on a little hilltop farm. ("Ba-a-a-a-a-h!")

I can't figure out what's happened lately. It's as if we were all freshly scrubbed and clean from our Saturday night bath and the drain monster yanked us down through the trap.It's like all of a sudden, more people are making the wrong choices. Phooey. Well, I won't have it. I say damn the torpedos and full speed ahead: love over hate, beauty over dreck, any day of the week.

(And while you're at it, would you please pay off my Visa card? :-)

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr just might buy that farm from you (doesn't hurt to ask).

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AUDIO CREDIT: embedded 44k file, European Birds -- Sounds and Sonograms.

DESIGN CREDIT: GRACK! byline graphic by Bob Farr.