Category: Internet
Why News Corp and the Wall Street Journal will fall firmly on their face
Any publisher that charges for online content is making a serious mistake.
That was my first reaction to the news this morning that News Corp has decided to start a system of micro-payments for access to online articles of the Wall Street Journal. But my knee jerk response is still the one I stick by – they’re making a serious mistake. Usually, I might take up some kind of devil’s advocate position on this one but it’s just nonsensical. I’ll tell you why.
It’s easy to throw my arms in the air and say it’s outrageous to charge for any kind of written online content because the internet stands for freedom and all that malarkey. I do happen to believe it does, but then, I don’t own the internet and nor does anyone else. It’s its own creature and it’ll become what it becomes whether it’s to my taste or not.
No, the fact is that people can charge for content if they want to but it’s not ethics that’ll cause their downfall, it’ll be economics. So, the WSJ starts charging folks to view their pages from Autumn. Then right off the bat, they’re going to lose a whole bunch of traffic that’ll simply go and get the same news elsewhere.
It makes no difference that the WSJ is a highly respected publication. Anything it scoops will filter down in a matter of minutes to the rest of the web. There’ll be no traffic sent back New Corp’s way but instead smaller sites will mop up what would have been theirs. There’s a very large element of shooting themselves in the feet here and with both barrels too.
The trouble is that this kind of of paid content will never work online. This isn’t music or film where you need the artists responsible to enjoy the information in the proper way. Any old fool can reproduce news once it’s been written. There’s no performance or delivery that the WSJ can copyright save straight plagerism.
Even if, in the short term, it made News Corp a few pence and encouraged all the other paper publishers to do the same, it’s going to end in tears in the long run. It’d create an apparently elite group of sites where nobody would bother going except for a few commercial users who can expense that kind of cost until they’re forced to make cutbacks by the bosses above.
Meanwhile the vast market of consumers would be up for grabs. Imagine all those free agents in search for news they don’t have to pay for. It’d be an absolute bonanza for smaller web publishers out there – from specialist blogs to networks like Gawker, Weblogs and, of course, Shiny Media. One part of me says, “Bring it on!”
The more traffic these sites get, the faster they grow and the more respected they become until people would rather get their information from these new trusted resources over the now internet-redundant likes of the WSJ.
Even if the whole internet changed to pay-per-view, it would only take one site to start publishing pages for free for the whole system to collapse and for that new site to take over. There’s reams of material on this kind of game theory in all sorts of walks of life; and I say it’s a shot to both feet because, all the while News Corp marginalises interest in their websites, the print industry becomes all the more endangered with advances in hardware and connectivity – namely readers, mobiles, Wi-Fi, 3G and beyond. It’s not a large step to see that hard copy newspapers will probably be a thing of the past. They’re putting all their eggs in the wrong basket. It’s madness.
If this is the route the papers chose to take, they’ll be making all the same mistakes that the music industry is just waking up to and very ones that have got the film business in a mess as we speak. You just can’t stem the tide. Consumers want this information online. They want it for free and that’s exactly how they’ll have it. It’s how it works already. News Corp is going to spend an awful lot of money trying to support an outdated business model when they should be investing in developing a more progressive approach. And if they persist with this experiment, they’ll have already lost far too much ground online to get back in the game without losing a lot more than they already fear they will.
Wall Street Journal pay-per-view for online content
News Corp’s the Wall Street Journal is to introduce a pay-per-view system for their online content. It’s unclear at the moment whether all their articles will be available subject to cost but what we do know is that the more specialist pieces will be more expensive.
The system is described by those inside as micro-payments but I start to wonder just how micro that becomes by the end of each year. The scheme is set to launch in the Autumn and doubtless all the traditional paper publishers will have their eyes very close to this one with probably both fingers and toes firmly crossed.
.tv domain name under threat with Tuvalu sinking
Er, we could be in a spot of bother here. Techdigest.tv is in danger of disappearing. According to internet domain bagging site Godaddy, the island of Tuvalu is sinking and it’s Tuvalu to whom we owe our .tv domain name just as we owe .co.uk to the United Kingdom.
Should any country cease to exist then, according to web law, the domain must cease to exist as well. Oh dear.
Tuvalu is only 4.5m above sea level at its highest, so with climate change on the radar, it’ll be the first place to be hit badly by rising sea levels. Worse still, the island is indeed itself sinking, as Godaddy warns. Firstly, islands sink back into the sea – that’s just what they do – and secondly, there’s a large degree of compaction cause by farming methods too.
So, when it’s being attacked at both ends like that, perhaps it’s no surprise people are now being advised away from the .tv suffix, even if it does lend itself to the video form. Time to start squatting on Techdigest.something else.
(via Boing Boing)
Homosexuality "does not exist in Star Wars", claims Bioware
A bit of a kerfuffle has erupted in the community surrounding the forthcoming Star Wars MMO: The Old Republic, after a representative from developer Bioware denied that homosexuality exists in the Star Wars universe.
Community manager Sean Dahlberg closed a thread discussing terminology like “gay,” lesbian,” and “homosexual” in the Star Wars universe with the words: “As I have stated before, these are terms that do not exist in Star Wars. Thread closed.”
It’s incensed the LGBT community that surround the game, who’ve pointed out that not only is that irrelevant to the discussion that was taking place, but that Juhanni, a woman in Knights of the Old Republic (a game also developed by Bioware), had a female lover.
The discussion has reopened in a thread here, which has spanned out to 56 pages, though at the time of writing it seems to have devolved into a flamewar. Homosexuality can be a difficult subject to approach in a videogame, but shutting down all discussion of the topic is deeply offensive, and shouldn’t occur.
(via MMOHub)
4chan founder named as "World's Most Influential Person"
Each year for the last three years, TIME Magazine has run an internet poll to find the “World’s Most Influential Person”. This year, the winner is moot – a 21-year-old student whose grandmother calls him Christopher Poole. He’s the founder of 4chan.org – the world’s second biggest, but certainly silliest, message boards.
Since 2003, when the site launched, it’s brought Lolcats, Chocolate Rain and Rickrolling into the mainstream. More impressive is its traffic, though – the site gets 5.6 million unique users a month and one sub-board sees 150-200,000 posts a day.
Although TIME’s web team was forced to act against several attempts to hack the vote, moot recieved 16,794,368 legitimate votes. Although he might not seem the obvious choice for World’s Most Influential Person, nor do previous winners – Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto in 2007 and Korean pop phenomenon Rain in 2006.
TIME.com managing editor Josh Tyrangiel said: “I would remind anyone who doubts the results that this is an Internet poll. Doubting the results is kind of the point.”
(via TIME)
Swine Flu: Google maps and Twitter panic
The weekend’s reports of an outbreak of Swine Flu originating in Mexico have created something of a stir on Twitter and done a very interesting job of highlighting some of the major differences between the real-time search system and the more established approach of Google.
On the one hand, Google has assimilated an interesting webpage on facts of the flu on their own and other people have created Google maps pinpointing all the confirmed cases worldwide. At the other end of the scale, the speed of response and democracy of search results on Twitter has produced something closer to mass panic.
There’s been a Chinese whispers effect whereby a host of tweets built around anecdotal evidence, to put it kindly, have produced a mixed bag of misinformation and hysteria. My personal favourites are the opportunist:
and the poetic:
There must be some interesting looking log cabins in that town.
To fan the flames of total ignorance, I’d suggest that this outbreak will have a similar effect as the bird flu a few years back. We’ll see it all over the news. They’ll be plenty of reported deaths but they’ll mostly be amongst the very old and the infirm and the WHO will get a grip in it soon enough.
Meanwhile, if you find yourself hot, sweaty and oinking uncontrollably, I suggest you get yourself down the docs pronto.
(via FP)
Pirate Bay founders jailed and fined, vow to continue
It’s taken two months to get here, and now a Swedish court has jailed the four men responsible for The Pirate Bay for one year.
Despite the fact that The Pirate Bay’s servers don’t host any copyright material themselves, merely acting as a gateway for users to torrent material from others’ machines, the court has ruled that they must also pay £2.4m in damages.
A representative of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), John Kennedy, said that, “There has been a perception that piracy is OK and that the music industry should just have to accept it. This verdict will change that.”…
eBay nutcase of the week: Turbonegro bass player's hair
I have two important pieces of news for fans of Norwegian punk band Turbonegro. First bassist Thomas Seltzer, aka Happy-Tom, has cut off his hair, and second, he’s put in on eBay.
It’s a pretty healthy, if grey mottled, looking mop and the description is that it’s fresh from the scalp. The bidding’s currently reached $190 but you’ll be pleased to hear that the item is protected against loss or damage up to $100 of that.
And, just in case you were wondering if it really does belong to Tom, there are a number of photos on the auction site featuring both Mr Seltzer and his former thatch. All Turbonegro fans still conscious have 4 days 3 hours to react.
(via CMUdaily)
Kangaroo could be hopping Channel over to France
So, it looks as if the poor developers behind the Competition Commission scuppered Project Kangaroo will not have all their good work go to waste. No matter that the BBC et al couldn’t get the multi-channel video platform up and running in UK because Orange’s parent company, France Telecom, is looking to take it across the Channel.
A spokesperson for France Telecom said: “We are examining this company and we see of course that it could be interesting. Nothing has been decided but we can confirm we are examining it.”
It’d be a bit of a shame for the consumer to see what should have been our service disappear off elsewhere but, with a suspected £20m invested in the project in the first place, you can hardly blame them.
(via Brands Republic)
The internet could be run out of capacity within two years
Growth of the internet could outpace its current infrastructure within two years, claims a new report from a clutch of scientists at a university. Unless billions of dollars are invested in new fibre-optic cabling connections within the next six months, internet users could face increasing interruption of service.
“It’s going to be madness,” claimed the project leader, “Amazon will be up sh*t creek without a paddle, eBay will be all at sea, and Twitter users are going to get into a right flap.”
The study is the first to apply the equivalent of ‘Finagle’s Law’ to the internet. It’s a scientific principle which, when applied to the massive dataset collected by the scientists, predicts that things are going to rapidly start falling apart before next Christmas.
The blame has been pinned on spammers, software pirates and child-porn rings, which all use massive amounts of bandwidth – up to a 161 exabytes of data each year. “We think the exaflood is generally not well understood, and its investment implications not well defined,” said a leading industry analyst.
The Chinese government has been the first to respond, changing their one-child policy into a one-strike policy. Under the new system, anyone accessing the internet more than once a day will be disconnected for life. Unless similar action is taken by other world leaders, however, the problem is only likely to escalate.
A few proposals to increase the size of the internet are also on the table, but at a very early stage. One idea would see earth bouncing its communications off the rings of Saturn, using the latency inherent in such a procedure as a storage device.
Another would see the internet being put into a massive zip file, which users would have to unzip manually before use. Linux users are up in arms at this suggestion, demanding that the internet be available as a .tar.gz archive, too. Apple are also rumoured to have plans to launch their own internet, which they claim will be “really fast”.
