I think Fake Sigi has a good point about bloggers ...

2009-11-20T10:33:50.443-05:00

I think Fake Sigi has a good point about bloggers and the democratic filter sites (digg, 3nil) being gatekeepers, albeit thumbsucking gatekeepers in pajamas. In a world where the Guardian and Times publish 40-60 articles a day, why go cover-to-cover when a trusted gatekeeper will highlight the highlights?

As for the wall, Itunes originally tried to create song files which could not be reproduced in MP3's. What happened? In addition to anti-trust concerns, consumers went elsewhere.

I agree with you Richard that the "never ending horizon" of the web will eventually end - this is a 18th century landgrab and will get ugly once 80% of the world is online. DNS attacks will look like water balloons, but we're still a decade or two away from that kind of saturation and depletion of server resources.

I also think that, fundamentally, lots of global corporations have based business models on a top-down-same-thing for everyone business model - but the web gives us the power to find niche/quirky media content which is more suited to our unique preferences. In a way, that's a bad thing because maybe I'm shutting off myself to different perspectives. But its happening....

I think a major problem with paywalls is that it d...

2009-11-20T09:10:10.964-05:00

I think a major problem with paywalls is that it doesn't prevent the information from getting out there and being freely discussed anyway. Look at the Sports Business Journal - they put big MLS news behind a paywall, one or two people pay for access and post about it, and everyone else links to those people. And hell, it's the same way with a newspaper - a single copy bought for 75 cents can wind up in a coffee shop and be read by 50 people.

In the meatspace, subscriptions were never the main revenue generator anyway. So I think that to replicate that in cyberspace, you're going to hurt your ad revenue, which is what you should be trying to maximize. If the papers do this, they're dead. Watch what happens if the Wall Street Journal ever tries to finally seal off it's (partial/leaky) paywall from google. That's the bellweather.

As for your News Reader Only browser, I think that's been tried and it will be tried again. With DRM schemes you have two concerns - one is user expectations, and two is the assumption that all users are criminals right off the bat. The vast majority of news is commoditized anyway, and there's a public interest for it to be that way. So in my opinion, you're going to have a real problem ascribing significant monetary value to something that people are used to trading back and forth amongst themselves (and their media) for free.

Even specialized sources of professional information like Lexis or Westlaw are having to deal with things like Casemaker coming in and making most of what they do dirt cheap. Now Casemaker will try to upsell you to better tools, but then that's different from charging an arm and a leg just to get access to the information.

What does have value is aggregating all that information, processing it, making sense of it, and reproducing it in a way that is helpful to others. At the moment I'm convinced in the value of "gatekeepers" because people rely on them to filter out the noise and tell them what's relevant. The "problem" if there is one, is that the new gatekeepers are no longer controlled by wealthy interest groups - they're breaking out on their own. And so these interest groups are furiously trying to figure out how they can get control back. Give them time, I'm sure they'll figure something out.

Finally, I think the term "thumbsuckers" is unnecessarily derogatory. If people didn't like to talk about and reprocess what was going on around them, there would be no media business to speak of. So fuck that. And quite honestly, "old media" has done a terrible job of going out and "finding" stories. For example, Grant Wahl probably got called up by MLS public relations, was told Garber would answer some quesions yesterday (maybe even preapproved), so he gets on a plane and sits down and proceeds to ask some of the stupidest shit this side of BigSoccer MLS Rivalries.

The lesson? The public is consistently failed by those who are supposed to be going out and "finding" stuff. Access doesn't mean shit if you can't ask intelligent questions or make sense out of it. "Thumbsuckers" are needed just as much as quote monkeys, and better yet if they add something to the discussion as opposed to just parroting some pre-concieved narrative.

Comments on A More Splendid Life: Okay, So Where Were We? Ah Yes, the Inevitable De...

I think Fake Sigi has a good point about bloggers ...

I think a major problem with paywalls is that it d...