On buying pixels by the terabyte

I followed a link from one article, to another, and to yet another site.  There I found a blogger at the site Hogewash.com with this tagline:

Never pick fight with a man who buys pixels by the terabyte.

There’s two funny things in that line that got me chuckling.

As background, that’s a play on the old expression “Never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel.”

That means don’t argue with a newspaper editor. If you do, you might see 100,000 copies of his side of the story in print tomorrow morning. And another 100,000 copies of his further thoughts the day after.

This blog credits that line to Congressman Charles Brownson in 1964.  The article gives many citations.  A quick search on the ‘net suggests others aren’t sure where it came from.

The first level of funny is that just like newspaper editors used to be able to put near unlimited copies of their side of the argument into print, today a blogger can make his or her side of the story available to everyone with an Internet connection.  Just like with a newspaper editor, the only constraint is how many people you can get to listen to you.

The second and deeper level of funny is that anybody with an Internet connection can go ‘buy’ a terabyte worth of pixels.  Everyone can print a million copies of their side of the story.

I buy my pixels from WordPress. They have really great deals available for your first terabyte. In fact anybody on the planet can go get a terabyte. Or two.

To date, I’ve only used a few gigabytes of my first purchase. Unfortunately, WordPress only sells in terabyte lot sizes.  Since I have four blogs, that means I have almost 4TB of pixels in stock.

If you don’t want to buy a full terabyte, I’ll gladly give you a few gigs to get started.