Reconstructing the American metro newspaper
On the MediaPost Online Spin blog, Tacoda founder Dave Morgan offers a prescription to save the local metropolitan, “big city” newspaper. Top of the list: “Face reality.” The newspaper industry has been irrevocably disrupted by the Internet, and to survive, companies must respond by deconstructing their business models and reassembling them into new, disruptive forms. Above all, metropolitan newspapers have the opportunity to reemerge as marketing services firms targeting the local business community--a strategy that could return the revenue levels and profits that the sector has traditionally enjoyed.
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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."
Hosted on Delicious, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious. We publish media file links as we discover them.
Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.
more media file links for October 21, 2008:
Where attention flows, money follows
On The Technium blog, writer and analyst Kevin Kelly summarizes the principle that has made offering a free product or service such a winning formula for Google, MySpace, iTunes, and many others. In a global market where it has become easier than ever to invent and distribute things, people cannot keep up with all the potentially useful items that exist. Usefulness by itself has become the minimum standard. To last, things must be able to capture--and hold--our attention. And from this kind of persistent attention, sooner or later, money reliably flows.
The four kinds of free
On The Long Tail blog, Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson diagrams four kinds of free business models: (1) direct cross-subsidies, where lost revenue from a free product is made up through fees from a related product; (2) third-party subsidies of free products, like advertising and sponsorship; (3) “freemiums” (or “versioning”), where some users pay for a product while most obtain it for free; and (4) the “gift economy,” where free products are exchanged for non-monetary rewards.
Avoiding ruinous compromises
Twenty-five years after the launch of the GNU free operating system, Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman warns that while the free software movement must continue to make necessary compromises with the commercial software sector in order to advance the movement’s goals, it must also avoid “ruinous compromises”: ideas or actions that undermine the movement’s long-term goals by prioritizing “consumer values” such as price and convenience over “citizen values” of individual freedom and community cooperation. Such compromises create the illusion of accelerating the movement, while in reality they lead it down the wrong road.
File sharing doesn’t always violate copyright, US judge says
The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports on a peer-to-peer file sharing case before US District Court in Minnesota, in which the judge ordered a new trial after reversing himself on a key ruling. The judge had instructed the jury that it was a violation of copyright law to make a music file available to others in a public folder on the Internet, but later decided that the act of making the file publicly available was not illegal by itself. In addition, the judge called on Congress to significantly rein in the size of damages allowed for illegal file sharing.
RIAA v. The People: Five years later
In September 2003, the RIAA fired the opening shot in its “tough love” campaign to deter illegal music file sharing on P2P networks--first, by suing the networks themselves, and later by suing individual users. The result? After more than 30,000 lawsuits and threats of legal action, 95 percent of all music downloads still come from illegal sources. In a report released in September 2008 to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the RIAA’s campaign, the Electronic Frontier Foundation pronounces the music industry association’s “education by lawsuit” strategy a manifest failure, and recommends that it adopt a collective licensing regime such as that in force for the public performance of music works, in order to open a simple and straightforward pathway for music consumers to come into voluntary compliance with copyright law.
The expansion of ignorance
According to The Technium’s Kevin Kelly, information is growing at a rate ten times faster than any other manufactured product--66 percent annually, compared to a 7 percent average for commodities like concrete and paper. Yet the paradox of science is that every answer breeds at least two new questions. So while knowledge is expanding, the field of inquiry is growing even faster, and the gap between what is known and unknown is widening exponentially.
Semantic web companies are, or soon will be, making money
ReadWriteWeb recaps a report published in September 2008 by entrepreneur David Provost about the state of the semantic web industry. The report surveys 17 companies in the semantic web space and provides a basic taxonomy that illustrates the range of applications for which the technology--which promises to revolutionize the Internet by making the meaning of online content understandable by computers--is being put to use. The post includes a link to the full 38pp report.
CBS testing Social Viewing Room: Watch stuff with strangers and talk during the show
Techcrunch’s title for this post says it all: CBS Labs has rolled out a new experiment it calls Social Viewing Room, which allows users to watch a streaming HD TV show together and chat about it online. Blogger Michael Arrington is skeptical about the uses of this technology for anything except live broadcasts; but that niche includes some of the most popular program categories, including sports, news, and reality shows.
