Russell Beattie

Okay, I've gotten a lot of this recently in my email and I figured I'd just make a blanket statement here:

• If you're a student: Do your own homework.
• If you're a professional analyst: Do your own research. I haven't been reading mobile news every night for 8 months to write your summary for you.
• If you're a magazine editor: No, I'm not writing an article for free. I've gotten this request three different times already this year. Do you get paid? Yeah, well show me the money as well.
• If you're a marketing person: There's a fine line between announcements and SPAM, learn what it is.
• If you're a pirate: Don't email and ask me for cracks. Ever! What are you fucking thinking? If you do it again, I'll publish your email here, find out where you work and send it to your boss. Idiot.
• If you're a company doing some sort of marketing thing: Sorry, I'm not going to be a judge for your contest.

I'm not trying to be a dick, honestly. It's just that I, like everyone else on the planet, has too much to do and too little time to do it. These constant requests are getting ridiculous. I am neither famous, intelligent or rich. I'm simply a blogger who reads the same stuff you can read, plays with the same technology you can play with and writes about it online. That's it. Nothing special.

Feel free to email me, that's why my address is so obvious at the top of the page. Just before you email me, please *read* my blog. I write just about everything I think and know here. There's no secrets. I don't mind the emailed questions, but don't ask me something which can be answered in 14 seconds by reading through my weblog for a bit. And do your own work.

-Russ

Oh, I want to make sure that it's known that there are a lot of damn cool people who email me to ask things as well, but it's okay. For example a student named C�sar C�rcoles emailed to ask if he could republish my long-ass MMS rant for his university and I said, "sure, and please email it back so my wife can take a look" and he did the next day. He translated that ENTIRE 3,000+ word rant into Spanish on his own. That's cool as hell and a lot of work. That's the sort of request I can respect.