A friend and fellow sports journalist who’s trying to carve out his own way on the Web explains why he passed up the chance to tell others how to raise money on the Internet. By eschewing the trend of “extending my brand” he prefers instead to draw from the examples of small ventures that abound in his Rhode Island town:

“Just beyond the first couple rows of houses is a cluster of small Pawtucket businesses, many of which are over a generation old. There’s a high-volume laundromat, a barber shop, a credit union for city and state employees, a golf supply store, and an auto maintenance shop that specializes in Saabs. They’re all doing well, despite the economic downturn, even despite the fact that I don’t do any business with most of them. And they don’t care, and they don’t unnecessarily chase my business. They keep doing what they do, catering to their niche markets, making their modest profits. Once the web catches on to that dynamic, things will be just fine.”

A little potpourri from the last few days while I work on blogging/writing/site building on a number of fronts. There’s plenty on my plate offline (for now) that I’m excited to be working on. For now, enjoy these links:

• Web contrarian Andrew Keen sits on a panel with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and calls him out by name repeatedly in making the argument that “the Internet is ideology.”

• Former U.S. Senator and Vietnam veteran Larry Pressler on Connecticut Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal’s false military claims and the generation of elite political leaders that period spawned:

“Many of these men who evaded service but claimed idealism lead our elite institutions. The concept of using legal technicalities to evade responsibility has been carried over to playing with derivatives, or to short-changing shareholders. Once my generation got in the habit of saying one thing and believing another, it couldn’t stop.”

A bit superficial, although there’s some truth there. Politicians of all generations say one thing and believe another, if merely to get or to stay in office. There never was a truly noble generation or class that dominated government, no matter how positive their achievements might have been.

Sorry, that’s just the Mencken in me coming out.

• Here’s a brief video from PBS Media Shift executive editor Mark Glaser with sports journalists who are using the Web to recreate their careers and give new life to the work that they do. Ann Killion, late of the San Jose Mercury News, like me is a newspaper refugee who covered “niche sports” (soccer, women’s sports) and believes the Web is ideal for this. That’s what I’m pursuing very heavily right now, and hope to have some results to report here soon: