My Store is Open For Business- As Usual it will Make me no Money

Be giving away everything I’ve tossed on to the web for not only free, but without really any requirements, I have mastered opposite of a knack for web entrepreneurship. I refuse to use that word that turns money into a verb than a longer noun. Here is my latest version of un-capitalistic strategies

This is a design I created for my Gasta talk at last year’s OER24 Conference.

As usual this has roots in some sarcasm. I think I had this idea to riff off of the antics of Agent 86’s entrance in the title sequence of Get Smart, to make something in response to a 2023 talk Stephen Downes did. I kind of (well officially) stole a screen from a YouTube clip, brushed out the SMART letters, and added Federated in the closest font I could find (Georgia).

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When I later came up with the silly idea to do a pro fediverse spoken poem for OER24, it just seemed right to do it wearing a one off t-shirt. I made my own from scratch, redoing the text and using the icon Fediverse logo proposal by Eukombos (CC0). This is cleanly legal! Right? Hello?

There is something special about having a themed shirt for a talk, making it more a performance than blah blahing while slide flipping. This is something I always appreciated about my friend Todd Conaway. I saw him once wear a raincoat and smask a TV dinner box with a hamer. Anyone can wear a suit jacket and a tie. Yawn.

So I was there in Cork wearing my shirt and ranting.

There is a precedent. I once had printed a Yahoo! t-shirt for a 2015 talk where I pretended I was still in 1996.

Enough nostalgia.

Sometime last week, I posted the t-shirt logo in Mastodon in response to something. I knew I saw a response from my pal Andy Rush about desiring a t-shirt version, but darn if I can find it now. But I kept thinking I gotta do this. It’s been a while since I set up a web t-shirt thing, I know I used …. that one… I forget, it was one of the first ones.

Now there a gazillion of them, and without too much detailed research I set my “store” uo on Threadless as https://cogdog.threadless.com/

Oops, I forgot to make it public.

Then it was, and within a short time, I got an email that said I had sold my first shirt. And I had earned $5.

Holy f****! I did niot want to take money. That is wrong. So I dove back into the dashboard, and found out how to set up so proceeds from the sale go to charity.

For the Get Federated shirt this is:

• 50% of profit goes to World Central Kitchen which delivers meals to people in humanitarian and climate crisis zones, currently doing some of this work in Gaza.
• 50% also goes to the Rain Forest Trust so they can purchase lands to save critical wildlife
• A small extra bit comes from Threadless.

I get 0%.

While in the store, I decided to set up a CogDog shirt for sale using the lovely logo created for me by Bryan Mathers. When thousands of these sell, i will happly earn $0.00 but will be donating

• 50% to World Wildlife Fund so they can continue to save more endangered species.
• Another 50% to Doctors Without Borders so they can bring medical care to the people who need it most, in crises, and these volunteers are on the front lines, sometimes being the ones harmed by so-called fellow humans.

And yay, I get another $0.00

No I am not deluding myself, these are piddling amounts. But its something. And I don’t want to make money from the web.

That’s where we went wrong with the web, when it went the dream of some physics researchers to openly share their work, and others who saw the value of a sharing economy down the sludge hole when the web was seen as a place to earn money, to extract dollars, to take from the web, not give to it.

I have always done my stuff for the web on the side of work, not as my work, and I refuse to change that.

Give stuff away. You will get more in the long run than trying to squeeze it for a dollar.

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Featured Image: Mine and its yours for free to do anything with, make a gazillion dollars with it. Go ahead. Open for Business flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license