I think rather than try to convince us one way or the other, just tell the story and let us make up our own minds. Honestly, I don’t think it matters – Steve Jobs isn’t exactly the first person to have other people have different opinions of him.

No one can doubt that Steve’s methodology works, and you said yourself that it’s to push you to do better work – I don’t think he’s doing it because he wants to be malicous. I might be wrong, but I’m just beating a dead horse to tell you not to do it…

I’ve been looking at some vintage Mac systems for the past few days and after looking at so many beautifully designed systems (even by todays standard) I have set my heart on getting the G4 Cube. I’ve placed my order for it.

From reading about it, despite its problems that it encounters, I still don’t understand why this machine didn’t sell. Was it just ahead of it’s time.

Perhaps you could shed some more light on this particular product. I think that if Apple came out with a product like that today (with its design flaws corrected) it would be a hit. It’s got flair, it’s new, original, something different. What’s not to like!

I like it!

Kotke:
http://www.kottke.org

Gui Leite:
http://www.guileite.com/

Those links are to illustrate the examples I gave at the text above.
Cheers;

Carlos Alberto Pinto Peixoto Bastos Santos

I’ve been reading your website since the beginning, when it had like 3 posts on it. I still remember the old template used, w/the Writers Block Live box in a blue tone and a more close-up shot of the pen. At the right I could find about 3 white boxes w/”Put your ad here” written on them. All this included in a sensation of a very promissing website, where I could finally know lots of inside information about the technology company I like most.
But time have passed, not much but still passed. As me, loads of people from all around came around w/the avid curiosity about what some call the “Cult of Mac”, it was even “slashdoted“! As consequence for those happenings, an ever increasing demanding for bandwidth that we all web-state owners are afraid of.
I know that the costs to keep up a website popular as yours aren’t cheap, even though the price of storage is decreasing everyday. I know that you still want to share the writing of this book, and still receive our instant feedback for it. But one thing I can’t understand is your option to accomplish that through making “Writers Block Live” a classified page, packed w/tons of eye blinking graphics to, worse, unrelated stuff. And to complicate the situation, make the very heart of your project (the writings of “Jobs I’ve Known”) almost disappear because it’s buried under tons of ads.
Shortly after I started visiting your website, I notice the appearance of Google Ads. Maybe because of it’s dominance over the internet, or because it’s mechanism of showing ads related to what it’s showed on the page, or even because people are so thankful to use Google tools and service (that many rely on to survive in the internet), I couldn’t complaint. And actually you may find something that is of your interest.
By the same time, the white boxes at the right on the main page started to give their places to ads (including from Google), which also are acceptable.
However to my disappointment (and disgust), by the middle of this month your main page started to get polluted w/15 ads, some of them are pretty big, using shocking colors to get excelled from whatever else at the page. For me, more than the extra cost I’m paying to navigate at your website (because the many more KB added for the graphics on the ads — and this under a sluggish 33.6 Kbps connection here in Guantánamo, Cuba; paying €6 an hour for it), I’m suffering to find the content I want because I need almost archeological knowledge to dig under so many unrelated stuff from annoying ads.
When I have written at the address bar of my web browser, I’m not looking for shopping women’s underwear for valentines day (even because in Brasil, where I was born, we celebrate it at June 12th, for Saint Anthony day) nor free-shipping from a store that doesn’t even accept international credit cards (because I’m not an US resident), nor I need a graphic of a blond woman telling me that some service is selling US$ 2,95 .com domains. When I want this stuff, I look at Froogle or search somewhere more appropiate. When at Writes Block Live, I’m in search of the Apple’s backstage and also your comments on Aperture and DRM. And you can bring this w/o all the annoyance you are putting on us today.
The decision of summarized text on RSS is surely understandable (although people like Siracusa would be upset, as he said that NetNewsWire is his default browser); putting text ads or 1 graphic ad at the page of your articles is something everyone may expect to find; adding “Writers Block Live” branded merchandise beyond bringing revenue adds “cool factor” to it; putting a few adds at the main page won’t annoy people, but privileging them like and multiplying them by 5, like what is happening today, surely make many of us upset and that way have lower consideration w/it’s content.
The internet is full of personal sites that are popular, all having high bandwidth demands, but that doesn’t mean that all of them used the option to make themselves a Christmas tree of ads. See for example Daring Fireball .
This site has it’s RSS loaded in every NetNewsWire copy (which is by far the most popular and dominant RSS reader), but still have a clean page that incredibly just show only 1 text add, for all of it’s content. Now look at Kotke , and how clean it’s webpage. And he dedicates himself 100% for it’s blog. And finalizing, look at Gui Leite’s , which has the most popular podcast in Portuguese . All of them high demand but none clogged w/ads.
Sorry by the length of this, but it was really sad to me to see one of my favorite bookmarks turned up in a corkboard of ads. I can’t wait to see the release of your book, and I’ll surely be one of the the first in line to buy it (unless if it costs like US$80 ), but in the condition that “Writers Block Live” is today, it’s certainly much less attractive then it was a few months ago.
I’m confident that this is just a temporary lack of taste and you’re doing your best to bring us the best experience when reading your site.
Keep up the good work Mike.
Sincerely,

Carlos Alberto Pinto Peixoto Bastos Santos