| March
11, 2000
I was just
informed that some readers think my remarks from two
weeks ago (see below) are complaints.
They think
I was complaining because we're broke. They think
I was complaining because we need to rely on
volunteers.
Talk about
misunderstandings.
For the
record, I was not complaining. Joking, yes. Bragging,
yes. But complaining? Absolutely not.
I'm proud
that we publish this website on a budget of thirty dollars
a month. I think that's a good thing.
(This is
not a request for donations. We don't want donations.
Thirty dollars a month is all we need, and we have it.)
And I'm
proud that every single person who contributes to this
site does it for free, as a volunteer.
And I'm
proud that we are inviting as many people as possible
to work on this site. The more people who contribute,
this less this site will reflect the limitations of
its originators' egos, and the more it will reflect
the wholeness of everything.
I think
that's a very good thing.
And now
I had better go meditate and watch this paroxysm of
pride dissolve into something more sattvic.
February
26, 2000
Would you
like to know how poor we are? Well, we're so poor that
we can't afford to pay writers for their work.
Our editor,
who has to explain this depressing fact almost every
day to potential contributors, says it sometimes provokes
disbelief. Apparently this site is so professional-looking,
or commercial-looking, or something-looking, that people
simply cannot believe there's nothing behind the scenes
here except some volunteers working from home for free
and thirty megabytes of rented server space.
But it's
true. We're penniless. And I'm going to prove it by
throwing open the secret financial books of our vast
enterprise and letting you see for yourself.
Let's start
with income. When people click one of our bookstore
links and make a purchase, we get a commission. In the
ten weeks that this site has been operating, we've earned
$26.09 from Amazon and $10.60 from Barnes and Noble,
for a total of $36.69.
I wish I could say more about income, but unfortunately
that was all the income we had, so let's move on to
expenses.
We spent $115 to register our domain name, $106.75
for HTML editing software, $29.95 per month for three
months (so far) to rent server space, $94 to a company
that registered our URL with 1500 search engines, and
$150 to buy 15,000 banner ads to attract more readers.
That comes to $555.60.
Now, these numbers may not seem very big. But they
are the only numbers we have. So let's go wild and make
a consolidated statement of cash flow out of them, just
like real websites do.
|
Consolidated
Cash Flow Statement
for Realization.org
From start of operations to date
(Feb. 24, 2000)
|
| Money
in |
$37
|
| Money
out |
$556
|
| We
owe* |
($519)
|
|
*The
money was laid out by a volunteer who works on this
site. |
The bottom line is, we won't be going public anytime
soon.
Now let me guess what you're thinking. You're thinking,
"What about those annoying banner ads at the bottom
of every page? Don't those things rake in big bucks?"
Well, no. The deal with the banner ads is, we let a
banner exchange company put a banner at the bottom of
each of our pages for free. In return, every two times
that somebody sees one of those ads, the company displays
a banner ad for Realization.org one time on somebody
else's site. We don't pay or receive money for this.
(And we don't get much advertising value either. Fewer
than one hundred people have come to our site via banner
ads since we started. But that's another story.)
The most pitiful thing about our finances is that I'm
only halfway down the page and already I've said everything.
Luckily there's something else I'm supposed to talk
about: volunteers. Yes, now that I've explained why
writers work for us for nothing, it's time to ask you
to work for nothing.
We need help with three jobs: copyediting, proofreading,
and link arranging.
Copyediting means rewriting (or helping the author
rewrite) an article. Some articles only need a few quick
repairs to spelling and punctuation. Others require
us to delete redundant or irrelevant sections, rearrange
what's left, write transitional sentences, polish up
the syntax, etc.
Proofreading means (to us, we've modernized the term)
fixing mistakes on our published webpages such as mispellings,
bad links, inconsistent capitalization, grammatical
errors, etc. (Since we reprint a lot of material from
other websites without editing it, such mistakes easily
creep in.)
Link arranging means you send emails to other websites
and arrange for them to publish a link to our site in
exchange for our link to theirs.
If you'd like to help out with any of these three tasks,
please send us an email at editor@realization.org.
Cheers,
Marilyn Cootsis
Volunteer Publisher
|
