Via this Slashdot thread (which was about a NY Times article on the accuracy of blogging, which wasn’t very good), but the thread led me onto a trail of blog entries to an interesting Clay Shirky piece about the economics of information, and why micropayments for news & textual data are destined to fail (basically, because it is hard to judge whether the cost of that information, small as it may be, is still worth it before reading it). I had similar discussions about why I thought the licence fee, rather than channel-based subscription was still the best for way of funding the BBC’s output, both televisual and online. Satellite and cable channels are streamed by topic (sports, history, movies etc.) to give an exclusive focus to give their advertisers a fixed niche of the populace to appeal to. As the BBC is meant to be inclusive and has no advertisers it does not need to go down that route.

Anyway, I digress, but the article is interesting reading. Its more focused on the providers of free content, and how creatives can discard publishers and can publish for themselves at much lower cost, but at the same time with less chance of directly profiting:

This disrupts the old equation of “fame and fortune.” For an author to be famous, many people had to have read, and therefore paid for, his or her books. Fortune was a side-effect of attaining fame. Now, with the power to publish directly in their hands, many creative people face a dilemma they’ve never had before: fame vs fortune.

It hints (without making a proper prediction) that as blogging and online publishing has empowered individuals the most, it will be individuals’ efforts (media such as text and still images) that are more likely to fare well compared to collaborative efforts like music and video…or maybe instead just that music and video will be produced in pairs and threes rather than in large groups - there is an increasing range of small-scale video and audio productions showcased on things like b3ta.

Speaking of articles about blogging, a disappointing three-way discussion in today’s Guardian, asking whether it was more than vanity publishing - the discussion from all three, either consciously or subsconsciously, is phrased in the slightly exhibitionist, confessional style that many weblogs are in. Generally, I have little time for “my day was like this” blogs (And yes, I know I do it occasionally in this blog, sorry) unless they really are interesting (only one of the three correspondents, Salam Pax fits into that category), and the much more exciting, meme-oriented, link-rich style of blogging (which was how I found the Shirky article above), which allows you to get to the 1% of personal material (and the opinions and links related to it) on the web that actually is any good, is what really makes the medium so exciting and promising, and not just an electronic Bridget Jones’s Diary.

Not that the blogosphere is always a supplier of good content. Why the hell people think this is so damn good I have no idea (it’s near the top of blogdex, for fuck’s sake).

This entry was posted on Monday, April 19th, 2004 at 23:32:33 and is filed under General.