I am doing a bit of personal fundraising to cover the expenses for repairing my computer. In all I have to raise $600, but I do not expect people to give me more than $20 a pop. To those who have given me more, thank you so much. To those who have not, thank you as well.

I feel that this kind of helping each other out is useful and ghastly necessary; especially those in the long tail of blogging who have been burned by the evil 'blog hive' pixies who controlled the Advertising Liberally network at BlogAds during the first half of the year.

A lot of us got burned out of advertising revenue by bad decisions that all squarely on the shoulders of the people who did not serve us well. Now that Sean-Paul (of The Agonist fame) is doing a fantastic job at serving us all equitably, we are all seeing ads served on our blogs once again.

It means I've spent 6 months scrapping by on culturekitchen and The Daily Gotham; bootstrapping on blood, sweat and tears. It's the reason why I have had to resort to asking for donations.

I just wrote back to one friend how this reminds me of Steve Gilliard's fundraisers, which would have happened right about this time of year. I'd joke we kept recycling the same $25 bucks, sending it to each other whenever we'd put out a call for help.

Steve used to say that PBS ought to be the model for running blogs like ours. I have to say that it's in a moment like this one that I have to agree with his assessment of the issues.

I'd like to brainstorm about this longer and harder because, for the greater good, I will have to find other ways to sustain the blogs beyond just waiting for ads to pop in our radar ---and realistically speaking, I just don't have the means to hire a advertising sales representative.

So, again, thanks a bunch for donating. I really don't want a new computer. I have more than $5K invested on my hardware and software. I want to give this baby another 2 years of life before making the jump to something new.

Thanks for going to my PayPal page to contribute.