Michael Gerber
Ya follow?

After writing this post on how to defray some of the costs of running Dullblog (keep lobbing over your preferences in the comments!), I’ve started very tentatively adding Amazon Affiliate links to songs, LPs, and movies. I mean, we all probably have every Beatles song and movie in several permutations, but… [Another way I could do this is have every post sport a little kicker at the end, something like “Media mentioned in this post.” The benefit of this is that it doesn’t distract the reader in the middle of the text. Better? Worse?]

I’m also occasionally linking to older Dullblog posts; do you guys read back into the site? You should; our lineup of contributors slowly shifts over time and some very interesting folks with very interesting opinions have appeared here over the decade. At this point, we’ve got over 700 posts, and I’m always wondering how best to have readers dig into them.

BTW, I didn’t say this and you didn’t read it and what was that weird squeaky noise but if we generate monies over and above hosting, I might consider paying for posts. Paying writers and artists is my life’s great pleasure and hoo boy would I love to start reaching out to the famous and infamous in the publishing game for Beatles stuff. That will have to wait to see what happens next.

This is what I think of people who don’t know who I am.”

But here’s my real question: One of the things that I’m noticing is that our posts often refer to historical events and personages—Timothy Leary, for example. Now I’m 50, and I know who Timmy Leary is, but a lot of our readers are from a different generation, and this is only going to get more so as the years pass. Would it be helpful to occasionally link to the Wikipedia pages of these people?

As a writer, I don’t want to muck up the flow of our posts with a lot of links. But I also am interested in this site’s potential to introduce fans of the Beatles to a bunch of interesting historical information (like CND). The Mike Gerber of Earth-2 is an historian specializing in the 60s and 70s, and he comes out to play here…even as Earth-1 Mike Gerber is loudly bitching about the limitations of conventional historiography.

Any opinions on this? My goal here is to make the discussions as rich as possible.