Making money on the internet, at least at a small scale, is exactly the opposite of making money in the real world. Trying something is so cheap, you should just keep trying things until something works. Unfortunately, just because it works a little bit – doesn’t mean it’ll work much more than that.

I started writing software when I was seven years old. Most of the years I clung to the idea that, someday, I would write a piece of software that people would pay money to OWN. When I began working, first as a coder and then later as a software architect, I still held out dreams of building the next Google – a gigantic, brilliant piece of engineering that would make me the richest man in the world.

And then I discovered Toyota.

This was also just about the time I was going broke, chasing one of these big, complicated visions.

To take my mind off things, I decided to start copying Jesse Andrews (the godfather of UserScripts.org). Build simple, clean, simple, tiny, simple… really SIMPLE pieces of software that do only one thing.

But I took a little twist on Jesse’s way of doing it – I would only work on things that I could code, test, and ship – in one sitting.

And we called it “Tiny Apps“. And it was good.

But not that good. A great little app, thrown together in a few hours and tossed out into the surf of the Intarwebs, is a bit of a sitting duck. People started shooting them – by which, I mean ripping our ideas off EXACTLY – and then getting tons of press.

US: Whoissocial.com. Four days later: usernamecheck.com

US: Gastracker.cognition.ca. Several months later: A whole bunch of them.

My original tiny app, a grid-computer-powered price-watching service, remains the only Tiny App to make much money. Okay, any money. Really. Freddy Mangum and I worked on developing this concept further, and prototyped a few variants – GoogAzon, which adds Amazon and eBay search results to google pages; and “The Kraken“, which was a tongue-in-cheek response to the “Pirates of the Amazon” extension that came out late last year.

The Kraken was notable enough to get us some substantial press (and a fair number of downloads, too) – but it’s never made a cent.

Here’s how I’ve made money on teh internet:

• Google Adsense. But only a little. ($46 in three years, roughly).
• Amazon Affiliate revenue – both embedded in software, and in blog posts. (Some many bunches of dollars).
• eBay Affiliate revenue – About $3.

Now, if you’ve bothered to read all the way down here, this is where I’m going to give away a little secret. And by secret, I don’t mean something really clever that I dreamed up on my own – I mean a strange and lucky coincidence that happened to lead to something cool.

As of right now, I make more money from my blog, than from anything else.

Seriously.

Actually, to be fair – I make more money off of a single post on my blog.

This post.

Which brings me back to Seth Godin, and Jesse Andrews. Just build cool stuff, solve your own problems – and share.

Oh, and get an Amazon Affiliate account.

• In a room of around 50 people, more than 3 had written their own plugins
• More than 5 were pro-bloggers
• Over half had customized their themes
• More than 10 wrote their OWN themes from scratch
• NO one agreed on the most important WordPress Plugin

This last one surprised me – I had expected a quick concensus on, perhaps the Ultimate SEO plugin, or maybe one of the social bookmarking ones. In fact, people didn’t even agree on the best stats tracking service. Obviously included:

• Google Analytics
• WordPress Stats
• Performancing
• Feedburner
• MyBlogLog (not exactly pure stats)

After the conference, I started working on distilling my many, varied experiences into a few coherent blog posts. Following my (long-ago) background in journalism, I looked around for a quick outside edit before I posted anything – and discovered, to my dismay, that you can’t share draft posts. What?

What followed was a quick IM exchange with Lloyd Budd, the rockstar “Community Guy” at Automattic, and an old friend of mine from the Netscape 8 days. He quickly confirmed that draft posts can’t be shared, and suggested I simply email the content of the post to a few friends. Arg.

All of which serves as preamble for yesterday’s message from Lloyd:

10:04:27 PM Lloyd Budd: I remember you looking for a plugin like http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/shareadraft/ recently
10:06:07 PM JustJosh: AWESOME
10:06:11 PM JustJosh: perfect, thank you very much
10:06:22 PM Lloyd Budd: my pleasure

This is now my new favorite plugin. It simply lets you share (for a defined period of time, like 2 hours) the draft view of a new post with, well, anyone.

In the spirit of our NorthernVoice talk, what’s YOUR favorite WordPress plugin – and why?

Key Takeaways:

• What does the citizen get out of it?
• Who participates?
• Why is CBC doing it? What are they getting out of it?
• CBC doesn’t give credit, except for photos. No link love.
• CBC asks for what they want – on air, and online.

The Progressive Economics Forum – Chief Economist / Blogger, Andrew Jackson. Marc Lee. So far just talking simple technology of setting up blogs – DreamHost, picking a theme, getting a domain name. Nothing specific about motivating activism yet.

Extent of “ripple effect” is limited to Technorati, and promotion to”Progressive Bloggers“.

700-1000 page views per day avg.

Intersections with Mainstream media – “A number of times when I’ve made a post, have led to mainstream media contacting for an interview. It just happened, not promoted. No mediaroom section on the blog.”

If you want media coverage of your blog, put that all in the mediaroom. Make it easier to capture.

Watch the Comments on the posts (via RSS, etc.), sometimes the first comment can derail the whole thread.

The DMCA is being used to shutdown dissenting voices in the US. Hosting companies will generally shut down the blog first, ask questions later.

TAKEAWAY: Use a Canadian web host to avoid the DMCA, or try:

• koumbit.org
• http://theorem.ca/

What about using Reddit/Digg for collecting Canadian political content? Try using the Canadian Reddit section.