Giving Stuff Away

There’s a lot being written right now about Microsoft’s giving Vista PCs to bloggers, and the ethics of the bloggers taking them. If you’ve managed to miss it, there are a few links at the bottom of this post that you can read, but frankly, I’m already tired of the whole subject, and imagine that many other people are too.

But since I’m no longer averse to stealing good ideas (way too many of mine have been lifted), and since we’re trying to drum up more activity on this blog (both posts and comments), we’re going to start a monthly giveaway to people who comment on the posts.

Here’s how it will work:

• Around the first of each month, we’ll give away one of our titles (recipient’s choice, and you can choose one of our suites, so you’d essentially get 3 or 4 programs) to someone who has commented on any of the posts in the previous month. People who have all the software they want can instead get some of our swag, which right now is still just stylus pens, though I’m thinking hard about getting something else.
• We’ll pick the winner each month using a random number that we map to the comment IDs.
• To be eligible, comments just need to be legitimate, and somehow related to the original post.

To help this along, I’ll encourage everyone here to post a lot more, so there’s more content to respond to.

And, as promised, here are the links to a few of the articles about the Microsoft giveaway:

I Started Something
Jason Dunn
Ed Bott
Joel on Software

There’s a lot more that’s been written about this, but starting with the above will probably lead you there.