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5000 Fans Theory was first floated by Brian Austin Whitney, founder of Just Plain Folks, in one of his monthly newsletters. Brian pointed out that an artist who has 5000 hardcore fans to give him or her $20 each year -- be if from CDs, ticket sales, merchandise, donations, whatever -- stands to make $100K per year, more than enough to quit the day job and still have health insurance and a decent car.

Now, 5000 is a big number, but not that big. That's like, what, one-eighth of an average baseball stadium? And you might not even need that many. Here's an exercise: take your own salary, pre-taxes, and divide it by 20. If you were to quit your job right now and start living as a full-time musician, poet or author, that's how many fans you'd need, spending $20 each year to support your art. So, if you're making $30K yearly, you'd need 1500 paying fans each year to replace your salary. And it gets better if you're willing to take a pay cut. In Washington state, where I live, a person working for minimum wage would only need around 700 paying fans. As Hobbit sez, there are a lot of people working for minimum wage doing stuff they hate.

Note that I say "paying fans." This is important, because depressingly enough, it's a numbers game. You could already have 5000 people on your mailing list, but only a percentage of them will actually invest some money in you. I have no idea what that percentage is, but it's small. If you're lucky, you'll have a few hardcore fans who offset those merely interested by contributing more dollars to your cause. At this point it (sadly) starts to smell a lot like Statistics 101.

And of course, it's not a steady paycheck. Remember also that tastes change, and sometimes people just stop being interested in what you do. So your quest for new friends and fans is never really over.

The attraction of 5000 Fans Theory is that the numbers, while still large, are very much attainable. You really don't need millions of fans across the globe to be a career artist, just a few thousand who actually care. And: the committment to find them.

I'm gonna try to tie this all together to make a point: if you really like a particular artist and want to support them without paying for yet another piece of plastic, the very best thing you can do is tell other people. Swap those MP3s, burn those CDRs, blog about them, play those tunes in your podcasts. Bring a friend, two friends, ten friends, to a show. Anything you can do to put the art in front of ten more potential fans. Get involved in the quest for fans and help make it happen. (Of course, the artist has to do his or her part, too. If all you're doing is pushing MP3s out to your website, you're gonna be waiting a long time for your 5000 fans to discover you.)

Google Suggest and Google Maps are two examples of a new approach to web applications that we at Adaptive Path have been calling Ajax. The name is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, and it represents a fundamental shift in what's possible on the Web.

Ajax isn't a technology. It's really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax incorporates:

• standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
• dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
• data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
• asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
• and JavaScript binding everything together.

As others have noted, a shorthand term comprised of the intials of a series of words, and is itself pronounable as a word, is an acronym. Revisionist hostory not withstanding.

The XML part is typically ignored in AJAX discussions, either because people find XML all scary and complex (and so use html/tag-soup), or because they do not understand the inplications for character encoding and internationalization.

The link mentioned doesn't work well in Mozilla 1.2.1: no hyperlink.

And konqueror can't even render the page. It says its invalid:

XML parsing error

fatal parsing error: the document is not in the correct file format in line 6, column 37
<link>http://www.scottandrew.com</link&gt ;
^

Abstraction breaks all that geometric structure, and the geometric structure is what the user sees.

Abstraction breaks all that geometric structure, and the geometric structure is what the user sees.

This is completely bogus.

Try here, with the Widget example or sprite demo 4, or this Donkey Kong game rendered in DHTML. Maybe the most obvious example is Video pool which is very smooth with IE and totally unplayable with NS6 despite using virtually no code forking. (BTW, I'm not plugging my site gratuitously, it's just that I've written all these scripts and tried to address Mozilla's speed problems. There are plenty of other people commenting on this topic on other sites, eg Scott Andrew who amongst other things writes articles for Apple's website.)

Don't just take it from me though, Mozilla's OWN developers acknowledge the serious performance problems with DHTML. See here: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=129115 . I have Mac, Windows and Linux platforms here, and with the exception of Linux (for obvious reasons!) IE outperforms NS by an extremely wide margin with dynamic content.

Of course, if anyone would provide a link to a DHTML script that runs faster in NS6/7/Moz than IE then I'd love to see it. No? Didn't think so...