AOL continues to face hard times. Or though it would seem by the news coming out.

Yesterday, I peeked up briefly from working on a new site launch to read speculation that AOL might be planning lay off over 2,000 employees. I don’t like hearing about people losing their jobs and hope this doesn’t happen but a gig at AOL doesn’t exactly spell job security to me. You?

This morning I read that the Netscape digg clone idea that Jason Calacanis and crew masterminded is being moved … somewhere:

Visitors to Netscape.com will see a more traditional news experience very soon. Don’t worry, the social news site isn’t going away! We will keep you updated on where you will be able to find the social news site as we get closer to making the switch.

Why wouldn’t they want to announce where it’s going? If I was part of the Netscape digg clone crew, I’d be toning up the resume now. Quickly. Calacanis bailed before there was time to evaluate the fruits of his second labor (the digg clone results). He now has the convenience of saying that if he was there this change wouldn’t have been made.

Sadly, it’s in the AOL DNA to fail. Just as they’ve ruined other properties like Winamp and put too much stock in dial-up when broadband was the future. Here’s something I’ve written before and might sound a little crazy, but I wouldn’t be shocked if Engadget and the rest of Weblogs, Inc properties end up being deprioritized or sold off too. AOL doesn’t seem to know how to take care of good people, good products and good ideas.

Hold on now, I must add the disclaimer that I didn’t think the digg clone thing for Netscape was ever a great idea, but once they chose to go that route they should have stayed the course. Now they just look like they can’t make up their mind about what they want to do with a once great browser and website. What happened to the Netscape browser is shameful.

AOL and writers: a firsthand story
When Weblogs, Inc sold to AOL I wrote a rather lengthy post that deals with how AOL handles writers and the talent behind their web properties. What do I know about this? I was a volunteer at AOL back in the nineties, my first gig on the web you might say. The following post has been sitting in the preview bin for some two years and this morning I decided to finally publish, unedited. You’ll note, for example, that today is not Thursday and it’s not 2005. Readers can judge if this should have stayed in draft status or is tangentially related. I think it is, and adds a first party dimension to life inside AOL in the early phase of their business when many thought they could do no wrong. Life behind the walled garden wasn’t exactly roses.

As the AOL acquisition of WeblogsInc (WIN) continues to circulate the web today, I continue to ponder the unspoken part of this story that I’m sure at least weighs prominently on the minds of the 130+ bloggers at WIN: what will happen to us?

Writers are always wondering about something. The hard drive mind never stops clicking and whirring. That’s what we do. We think, dream, research, plan and at then write. We don’t always think of the business side of things, which might be the ultimate subtext to this story, but I guarantee the writers in that WIN group are thinking. And what are they thinking about?

Will I get a raise out of this deal? Will AOL come in and change the editorial guidelines? Will there be an emphasis put on more profit-producing material than material I find interesting?

Some of the braver writers will ask these questions, most will keep quiet because the money they do earn, however small or large, they need to pay for roof over head and food on table.

Some might even quit over the deal.

Apparently an internal WIN memo has already gone out explaining that the deal is real, WIN management will be staying, no AOL filtering of content will be instituted, but a new contract will need to be signed.

The alleged kicker? No raises. There is some vague reference to making more money, allegedly.

That is the WIN side of things, but what about the AOL side? AOL has been downward spiraling for some time, their dialup business on fire (in a bad way), their controversial process of not letting customers leave easily and perhaps their most positive move to date: the decision to open up their members-only content to the web. And remember what happened to Nullsoft?

So what does AOL think of writers? Really?

I know something about this from personal experience. We have to get in a time machine for a little bit though and go back 8 or so years ago when a 28k connection was considered fast. Remember those wonderful times?

Close your eyes and let’s travel.

One of my first writing-related gigs on the internet was at AOL in their keyword: novel area marked the Amazing Instant Novelist area (AIN). This area was a delightful place for writers to hone their craft and I immediately gravitated there. This was a period that ran from 1996-1998. I became so involved in this area that I was eventually invited to be one of their NOVLs. I was and remain (at least to my knowledge) the only NOVLWrite to exist on AOL soil. Seemed odd to me that nobody else would have chosen that NOVL name and perhaps it was pretentious on my part that I would be the only NOVLWrite on the web, but my AOL screen name actually had “write” in it too, so it made sense. I had to be NOVL something. I supposed I could have been NOVLHmm … but that would come much later.

From the minute I got online, the first thing I wanted to do was share my creative writing with others. So I sought out places to do that within our ISP, which happened to be AOL. Back then I remember how you had to fight to get connected, particularly in the evening hours, as everybody wanted to be online and there weren’t that many dial-up numbers available.

So, who are NOVLs and what did they do at AOL? NOVLs were the gatekeepers, TOS enforcerers and contest judges in the keyword: novel area of AOL. These people chose who won or lost the various weekly writing contests. There wasn’t a lot of words to work with. First it was 250 but it later would be expanded to 1,000 words.

250 words is about the size of an average blog post — to tell a short story! Easier said than done.

The prizes for winning were quite unspectacular and so was the NOVL pay (zero pay for the writers). NOVLs like I only had our AOL accounts comped, no actual money changed hands. Still, I enjoyed this place immensely. It was a place to work on the craft of writing and maybe win some “points” which if you had a zillion of them you might actually be able to redeem for some prize. I never cashed in any of the points I earned before or after becoming a NOVL.

Once I became a NOVL I couldn’t compete in the regular writing contests any longer, but I was able to compete in the NOVL competitions which were even more challenging.

Ultimately, I found that the time involved in being not only a NOVL and contributing short story fiction writer to be too time consuming and I had to move on to other things. You know, that business stuff. Our business couldn’t suffer because my time was being increasingly absorbed volunteering at AOL. Even if that volunteer time was spent doing something I enjoyed. Writing, I love, that is no secret. I also enjoyed working with newer writers, fostering them, encouraging them and reading new works of fiction.

This would be the last chapter in me writing fiction for the next six years. Totally backburnered fiction writing, in fact. I haven’t published any fiction since leaving that area which now makes it 7 years. That’s not AOL’s fault, of course, that’s mine. I spent that time building and expanding our business ventures online. It was a tradeoff in time that up until last year I had accepted.

Such is the cosmic truth of writers and writing: that those of us who love to write are often pushed and pulled in other directions because of real world finances. The real world is much colder than any of our fiction landscapes, no matter how arctic and inhospitable.

Meanwhile we continued working our growing offline business (totally unrelated to writing). I didn’t absolutely need to leave this AOL area to make money in other business online, but I wanted to do so because I felt on the business side of things AOL was getting the best deal. I wanted some of that ad revenue in exchange for content.

Just couldn’t see being part of the free content machine any longer for AOL. Here, AOL was getting all this content and an area that was run primarily by volunteers for almost nothing. There was never any discussion about sharing ad revenues with writers, only those pretty much worthless points that could be win for first place, second place and third place each week in the writing contests.

Sure, a lot of the writing in this area was trash. Hey, it was filled with writers of all skill levels, most of which were unpubished beginners, but everyone has to start somewhere.

Maybe not a huge number of serious, professional writers were contributing to this area, but some of the material that came through was at or darn near pro-quality, particularly from the NOVLs. All this content AOL got in exchange for bandwidth, comping some accounts and paying The Amazing Instant Novelist, Dan Hurley and a few of Hurley’s people. I’m guessing Hurley himself scored the biggest deal because they used his name for everything. All this time, AOL could run its own advertising deals around the area and in a small sense this was their Adsense program. Remember, this was before Google even existed, must less their Adsense program. AOL was pretty smooth about those ads too. And I remember hearing complaints more than a few times that there wasn’t much money to run better contest prizes.

Maybe “the area” (AIN) didn’t have much money, but AOL was doing just fine. The cries of poverty for AOL nobody really believed. Perhaps an early sign of greed?

The business side of me started believing that this AOL area wasn’t such a great deal for the writers after all. Yeah, a decent place at the time to get some exposure and to hone the writing — perhaps with a nom de plume — but not a significant place to build any professional credentials. Heck, years later blogs would provide a significantly better avenue of getting public exposure than any fiction piece published in the keyword: novel area at AOL. And definitely not the place to make any money from the writing. No Stephen King stories to speak of coming out of there.

There were stories of a couple writers who landed book deals, but I’m not sure if these deals were as fictitious as the content inside AIN. No idea if any of those authors ever actually got published or were just deals that died. So many books “almost” get published. My guess is there was at least one marginal success story, but I don’t know of any success stories at all.

The reality is this area was a business area for AOL, but not a business area for the vast majority of writers who frequented it, despite the fact that it was billed as this great place to learn the craft, cut your teeth, compete in weekly contests, oh, the community, yadda, yadda. Reality: a moneymaker financially for AOL and a fun place for dreamers and writers to compete against each other.

Before anybody except maybe Dave Winer even knew what blogs were, before RSS, before much self-publishing and promotion on the web really.

As it turns out, unfortunately, AOL didn’t do a very good job of archiving or promoting the writers who won these contests either. It was like you won something inside a vacuum which mattered primarily to the other writers but didn’t penetrate outside the walled AOL garden. They pretty much left the area run by Hurley and the NOVLs as long as nothing violated their sacred TOS. So much content, some great, some good, most bad, locked behind the door of subscription and not seen by the rest of the web.

I wonder how many writers thought: hey, if I share my writing here and win contests maybe it will get me noticed? That’s the irony. The model set up writers for the exact opposite. They weren’t going to get noticed unless they went out and promoted themselves beyond the AOL walls. AOL wasn’t going to do it, the AIN area wasn’t going to do it, it was as it always has been: the responsibility of the writer him/herself to do the real PR work.

At best these contest winnings were accolades to put on the writing resume or in a bio. This was a learning lesson for beginning writers, so I suppose on that front it was successful.

Also, because a lot of those contests winners, myself included, became archived and ultimately rolled off the AOL backend third party verification was difficult if not impossible. The WayBackMachine wasn’t going inside AOL’s member’s only areas. So if a prospective publisher or agent had actually wanted to validate the existence of these contest winners they would have a difficult time doing so. Screenshots to the rescue, I guess. On our word of honor. “Yeah, you know, that contest I won at AOL’s area … the one that isn’t there any more .. or maybe it is, I won that back in 19xx”

As for digital rights? Uh oh, murky topic. Did AOL own the digital rights because it was published there first in their contest? Or did the author own the rights? Hmm, indeed.

Now let’s jump back forward in time to today, 2005.

Blogs are all the rage and these blog networks created a new type of AIN area, although the focus being on non-fiction, not fiction. A place where writers could come and then be compensated in some more meaningful, real world way than “points” and comped internet accounts. Blog networks like WIN would pay a reported $4 or so for those same 250 or less words. I guess $4 is better than points. Some progress has been made.

WIN sells to AOL and what does AOL do next? Does AOL try and replace the WIN writers with volunteers? “Just look at the exposure you’ll get now!” Nah, I don’t think that will happen. The volunteer writing model doesn’t work any more as I believe some of these new startup blog networks who rely too much on playing the exposure card will find out over time.

I don’t have much faith in AOL, the company, and I already know from firsthand experience that they don’t really seem to care or do much for writer promotion, especially if it doesn’t benefit their bottom line. So for these reasons, I wonder what will happen to the writers. Maybe AOL has changed, heaven knows they don’t have the market cornered like they once did. It’s a new world of sorts and maybe AOL can learn from WIN something about writer promotion? Maybe now they will do a better job promoting the writing, the content. For WIN writers’ sake, I sure hope so.

We can’t use that time machine to go ahead from here and see what really happens, all we can do is predict and dream. That is what brings me full circle to the writers, because it is — and will always be — the writers that help to shape the future of publishing. Without their content, no advertising or business can or will be conducted.

Am I giving writers far too much credit? Maybe, but businesses live and die. Businesses get sold or fold all the time. Someday this blog will be sold or fold. On this subject, I know only one thing for certain: creative works can and do live past the sale or the failure. The text can outlive its creator and copyright owner. The writing itself lives until it is burned, deleted and forgotten from the minds of those who have read.

Deep thinking for a rainy Thursday here in the greater Seattle area.

Yes, I think about the real writers and wonder what will happen to them because without them, there could be no sale to AOL or anybody else. Wiithout good content — and many times even with good content — readers will not come. They do not come to the area to read the ads. If they did then websites would consist of only ads. Some sites did consist of only ads at one time, just domains with banners ads only, but now people call those ‘websites’ spam. There was a time where one could put up a domain with only ads and would make pretty good money.

If AOL remembers the past and focuses on paying writers what they are worth, then a bright future could be in store in this deal. However, if the writers are used like a neverending, low value commodity — a frequent disease contracted from publishers — then this will be yet another painstaking chapter in a future AOL fire sale. I’m no Johnny Smith from the Dead Zone, but I don’t need his powers to touch the keyboard and see the vision.

As for my writings in the AIN area at AOL? Are they gone? Lost? Deleted?

I’m not sure if these writings exist there any more … or if the area itself exists any more (I don’t have an AOL account currently and though I did think about joining to research it for this blog entry, I didn’t want the hassle over cancelling later).

Note to readers with AOL accounts: go to keyword: novel and do a search for NOVL Write and see if you can find some of my old writings. Let me know what you find, if any, in the comments. There are over 100 original fiction stories I posted there during the nineties.

Recently I registered a couple new domains that I intend to republish most of what I put up on AOL in the nineties, so maybe I should thank AOL for running the material off their servers (last time I checked it seemed that way). Also, on this new domain I’d like to publish material — mostly fiction I’ve written — that has never been published, including at least one of my finished novels.

Next month is the NaNoWriMo 2005, and I’ve got an idea that maybe this year I can actually finish if I join — yes, I’m still undecided about it. Last year I choked at 26,670 words, about half-way to the 50,000 goal. I think this year’s idea is somewhat unique and curious and actually focuses on the end goal number of 50,000 which is really novella-length, not novel-length.

Like my fellow writer bretheren, I’ll keep thinking, dreaming, researching, planning and then, good health willing, writing. Hopefully at least some of these words, while the business trades continue, won’t be forgotten.

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