At a party a few years ago, when I first met her, Cathy Seipp explained to me that she refused to start a blog because she didn’t want to give her work away for free. She made her living as a writer, and the idea of putting her well crafted prose onto a blog that generated no revenue seemed like a bad idea.
I suggested that to her that there were any number of things she could write about that wouldn’t infringe on her paid work, and such a blog would help spread her fame. She would make more money, I suggested, if she blogged.
Eventually, she did start a blog.
For more than three days now, since her death on Wednesday, “Cathy Seipp” has been the #1 search term on Technoriti. Right now, she’s bigger than MySpace, YouTube, Twitter or Paris Hilton.
That’s a fine tribute for a blogger.
UPDATE: There’s pictures of Cathy here and here. I should also note that I’m sure Matt Welch was a much bigger influence than me in getting Cathy to blog. Matt has photos here. And looking back on my posts, I was obviously wrong that she needed to switch to MoveableType and get her own domain.
Pretty amazing. That’s a nice post by Rachel Sklar, even though they had their differences on some matters.
I like the quote by somebody, “This is a little bit like having your neighborhood softball championship team land higher primetime ratings than the World Series.” True story.