Kudzu was a plant brought to America for the Centennial Exposition in 1876 in Philadelphia. It was taken South, and then it took over the South. Like information on the internet, in small quantities, it even seems appealing. When you are looking for one piece of information and get 2,172,607 possible answers, what good is a search engine? One kudzu vine is pretty and nice smelling, but several hills covered with kudzu is something else.

About the time we started SciFan, which is an Amazon Affiliate, I started noticing how many returned URLs in my searches were from Amazon Affiliates. Now it's almost impossible to do a subject search without getting zillions of would-be online bookstores in the results. As I told Olivier, we are part of the problem, and SciFan was adding to the kudzu. I really don't like that.

However, being an Amazon Affiliate is integral to the purpose of our site. SciFan's mission is to help you find books to read, and linking to Amazon is a natural solution. It is the first of many solutions we hoped to provide. In the future, we will add links for each title that will do searches for you on out-of-print databases, and even do a search on eBay or Amazon Auctions. We're working on a database system that when you click on a hyperlink title, it will take you to a page where all your options for locating a book is presented in one place.

In the early days of the web, there were no commercial aspects to web sites. Many people hated when banner ads or subscription sites started appearing. Having a vast online free public library would be wonderful, but it ain't going to happen. What are you favorite sites? How many of them are commercial? Very few ad-free sites work out in the long run. Creating and maintaining a web site is hard work. Notice how many wonderful free websites out in cyberspace stopped developing after a certain point in time.

Unless SciFan achieves a certain financial standing, Olivier and I will someday ask ourselves, "why are we working at this?" Right now were doing it for fun and experience, but in the future it needs to make money. If SciFan becomes a decent second job, we will probably keep working longer.

Okay, you ask, what about the problem of kudzu. We're fighting it on two fronts. First, if you come to our site from a search engine because you searched on a book title or author, you should find more than just a book for sale. Right now, coming to our site, it should at minimum show you that the book you want earned an award, is part of a series, is a classic recognized by fans and critics, or is a major book in a theme. Over time, we hope to add even more information. That's one way we're fighting kudzu.

The other way is we provide links to other sites that we have discovered are valuable resources. We're not quite a portal, but we aim to serve in that function. Yahoo prescreens websites with human editors. We do the same thing. If we don't have the information you need, we hope to point you to a website that might. We consolidate information. That's the other way we fight kudzu.

Actually, there is a third front, the SciFans who read our pages. People write us all the time telling us how to improve the site. Olivier and I don't know everything, and can't keep up with everything, so we truly value this input. It helps SciFan grow.

Finally, I want to point out just how we try to make money. Our primary income is from Amazon. We made $277 last quarter. We made a little money off of DVD sales, maybe $50. SciFan is starting a new money making section called The Magazine Stand. Since SciFan is about reading, selling magazine subscriptions is an obvious area to pursue. We make next to nothing off of banner ads. Our hosting fees are $65 a month. Overalln we make a few dollars (very few!) if you don't count our labor, equipment or research books we buy.

Making money off the internet is very hard. The challenge of building a web site that makes even pocket money is great. Most of the kudzu out there is because anyone can put up anything they want on the web. Most of the millions of web sites are from kids having fun, and that's cool. If you want to find strong fruitful trees that burst out of the kudzu then expect some commercialization. How many of us would work 20 hours a week just to provide a free service to other people?