In an information economy where information wants to be free, what's the future?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Followers
Blog Archive
-
▼
2008
(310)
-
▼
August
(22)
- Cartoon for September 1This was inspired by severa...
- Cartoon for August 30Pakistan impeached their dict...
- Barack's Big NightObama's acceptance speech, like ...
- Cartoon for August 28I know this is kind of stupid...
- THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: THE MUDDLE IS THE M...
- Cartoon for August 25It took me a while to get aro...
- Early WarningStay tuned...I'm rolling out my first...
- Biden? ZzzzzzzzzThis isn't as bad as 2000, when so...
- Cartoon for August 23John McCain's inability to re...
- Cartoon for August 21Barack Obama's text message a...
- THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: 13 DAYS IN AUGUSTTh...
- Cartoon for August 18A sex scandal claims John Edw...
- Cartoon for August 16The individual quest for shor...
- Cartoon for August 14In an information economy whe...
- THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: HOPE FOR AUDACITYWh...
- Cartoon for August 11The commander of Guantánamo a...
- Cartoon for August 9I never understood why newspap...
- Ted Rall Cover Story on AfghanistanFor seven years...
- Cartoon for August 7Just when you think Obama was ...
- THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: IT'S THE TORTURE, S...
- Cartoon for August 4Nations could burn. But we sti...
- Cartoon for August 2McCain needs someone to his le...
-
▼
August
(22)
hahahaahaha.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed this one. The debate really is about education, though. As IQs plummet, there is less and less of a need for investigative journalism, or "hard-hitting" cartoons. But hey, even the price of buying humans has gone down since the good old days...oh wait, those were the bad old days.
So, for exactly how many years was this country worth a damn?
RIP
The United States of America
1939-1968(and that's counting Vietnam)
I read 1/2 of "The Third Wave" and I wanted to kill all involved.
ReplyDeleteNothing you can do to stop it Ted. If it can be digital, it will be free.
ReplyDeletecaptain obvious said:
ReplyDelete"Nothing you can do to stop it Ted. If it can be digital, it will be free."
I think what Ted is saying is that "it" will not exist at all. You get what you pay for.
WHat is strange is that even I have to accept that there are more curious people today than there were in, say, the 50s. So the demand for good info should be going up. It has to be.
Ted has been saying that there are plenty of people who would read the paper if the papers would stop:
1) being lame
2) giving it away for free
3)running lame, boring comics etc
Remember people, circulation of paid dailies is actually RISING. But it is rising in countries where the economy is growing.
I think the TV stations have figured out the problem - streaming flash with embedded adds. This approach could be the best way to handle DRM issues.
ReplyDeleteThe whole appeal to downloading is convenience. I've dl'd TV shows I actually pay for because they broadcast in the middle of the night when I'm sleeping.
Now I can go to the TV show website and for a few adds I can watch pretty much right away instead of going through the hassle of downloading stuff.
Advertisers paying for everything? Well, maybe not the whole answer. Some content providers, I mean artists, have taken the step of cutting out a lot of studio infrastructure and flog the songs themselves (like Prince, or symbol, or whatever). The hook here is a personal connection with the fans.
So I think there is hope.
I see that you've discovered the concept of "gift economy", Ted.
ReplyDeleteAngelo, both you and Ted are quite wrong: there are plenty of people who aren't bothered by papers, and wouldn't touch with it with a six-foot long pole. Resurrecting your mythical and fearless "Worker's Daily" won't help it either.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is, Ted just doesn't get the internet. Of course there was a lot of hot air prior to the bubble bursting, but guess what, Google thrived even though it gives away most of its wares for free (but not the golden goose, of course).
Now for the obligatory parade of faithful asserting that Google is an eeevil C-O-R-P-O-R-A-T-I-O-N...
"Gift economy" or "free market?"
ReplyDeleteMaybe Ted is hinting that "free market" has been an oxymoron all along.
How does the AP make money?
ReplyDeleteFree stuff has always been around. Obviously, everything can't--and won't--be free, or even advertiser supported.
ReplyDeleteAs to "what's the future?" I'm afraid there are more questions than answers, but we've already seen adjustments. When Slate first went online, they tried paid registration--that was, very understandably, a disaster.
But in the 15 years since the Web exploded in size, the number of gratuitous freebies has decreased dramatically. At the same time, the free information is getting more and more clogged with bullshit, from spam to ideological agendas--it's tough to get good info a hot topic by just Googling it these days.
But I suspect we will continue to a see the same thing we saw with radio & music in the past--some free stuff abounds, but it also serves as free advertising for those who'd like to buy the full product. And this will happen eventually, even if it seems everyone is torrenting full album without thinking about it. The worst case scenario--the collapse of content-for-profit--ain't gonna EVER happen.
If that seems incredibly naive, I would refer you to Radiohead's "pay what you like" album-download experiment.
Umm, none of these comments seem to be mentioning what I took as the most important point of this comic, that it doesn't matter if something is free or paid for or whatever when there is no more electricity to power digital anything.
ReplyDeleteTed Rall may be America's BS detector but he does not understand the definition of a blog. Try something other than re-posting your cartoons and other columns.
ReplyDeleteandy, the Associated Press is a consortium. It's owned by the contributors - and hence, the source material just gets passed around. Its costs are infrastructure and staff, and everyone pays in a small amount to use it. Plus, even that's been a hard row to hoe. In 2006 it started charging extra for online content. That didn't entirely work out, it cost as much to administer that as they got in extra online fees.
ReplyDeleteI never saw, to be honest, the merits in giving TV and radio stations membership in the AP, period. Because the draw was all one way. When I was a print reporter, stories fell into 3 categories, as best I can recall:
1. Normal stories that the AP simply picked up and got used - all that you'd see was a dateline.
2. Stories of greater stylistic or reporting merit - your paper would be mentioned as the source (and bigger papers got this almost automatically).
3. Member shares - your byline and your paper's name would go on the story.
The reward was obviously in prestige. The number of stories you had picked up by the AP wire and especially member shares are added to the awards you win and that helps you get your next job.
As a radio reporter (i've worked both sides of this issue), most of my news was rip and read, I don't really see where a radio station, with virtually no reporting budget, carries its weight. I did rewrite most news stories - to condense them, and to convert them into a conventional narrative structure with a protagonist, conflict, crisis, resolution, denoument - so people would understand them and remember them.
I can tell you firsthand one way the AP paradoxically creates better journalism sometimes. My very first story for my first daily paper (i'd been at weeklies before that) got the name of the principle source and main person in the story wrong. I was under extreme and unusual time pressure, but still. Anyway, the AP picked it up and it went all over the country and all over our state and I heard the (wrong) name read on the radio etc. etc.
It was VERY painful, and our correction was abject. Fortunately our source was amused.
The most striking characteristics of the last panel are that there is not much of anything and that the devastation is not the result of decay.
ReplyDeleteSo... the question becomes "What happened?"
This initially sounds off the wall, but if you think about it, it makes sense. I think you will begin to see overlap between private investigators and reporters. If the information wants to be free, then you can't charge directly for the information. You charge for the service of finding the information.
ReplyDeleteHow do you compete with a cheap or free product? By charging money to customize that product for the client.
Interest groups will pool their money to hire investigators to keep informed of subjects of interest.
"What happened" is that society collapsed because no one got paid.
ReplyDeleteAnon. wrote:
"Ted Rall may be America's BS detector but he does not understand the definition of a blog. Try something other than re-posting your cartoons and other columns."
Yeah, well, I do understand one thing about blogs: they don't pay. So, unless I'm really not busy, I don't have time to make random posts. But I totally admire those who have the time to feed the beast and have trust funds that allow them to do so.
"...and have trust funds that allow them to do so."
ReplyDeleteyep.
you rock, ted!
@Ted
ReplyDeleteYou are a brilliant Political and Social Analyst and Pundit, but, if you're too busy and don't have time it's because you're doing something wrong (and I know precisely what it is). Maybe it's not a good idea to offend people who are trying to help you, hmm?.
You may not care about saving your career but I do and I can. If not for yourself, do it for the American People. We need you.
From a Dot-Commer who retired in 2001 at age 29.
Well, Anil, I'm all ears. And no offense meant--just saying, I AM too busy. Feel free to email me; I'm all for saving my career.
ReplyDeleteVery true. Virtual wealth generated hype cannot be traded for the necessities of life. I'm all for going back to an economy based on the production of goods and services.
ReplyDeleteThen again, I'm old fashioned. Didn't we decide that a non-virtual economy was beneath us because its bad for the environment or something?
Ted-
ReplyDeleteThose who produce quality work will ALWAYS get paid. The freedom of information on the internet simply makes it easier to see what is quality work before actually paying for it.
Are you kidding?
ReplyDeleteIf quality work was always remunerated, what appears on music's Top 40 and the NYT Bestsellers list would look very, very different.
incitatus uttered
ReplyDelete"Now for the obligatory parade of faithful asserting that Google is an eeevil C-O-R-P-O-R-A-T-I-O-N..."
cue crickets
I was trying to understand the incentive for the dailies' self injurious behavior.
ReplyDeleteThey must have thought they were going to be better off, at some point.
Ted -
ReplyDeleteYour definition of quality is just that, yours. I wouldn't and I don't pay for much of the Top 40, or the NYT best sellers list but I'm nowhere near arrogant enough to assume that just because _I_ don't like it that it's not quality; obviously enough people find it quality enough to pay for.
Theodore Sturgeon once said "95% of everything is crap". Well, I got tired of paying for 95% crap, now I look at everything and only pay for the 5% I deem quality. This holds true for every person I know that gets things off the net.
So I'll modify my statement, but only slightly: Those who produce quality work will ALWAYS get my and my friends money. All the freedom of information on the net does is allow us to determine what is quality BEFORE we spend our hard earned cash on it, instead of after.
The problem was never the internet; the internet is the answer to the problem of companies and artists screwing you because you had to shell out your hard earned money before seeing if their product was crap or not.
@Ted
ReplyDeleteemail sent!
But the Singularity,
ReplyDeleteThis must be what Phil Ochs meant when he said a liberal is someone who is 2 steps to the left in good times and 2 steps to the right when it affects him personally.
ReplyDeleteTed's previous columns have argued for free healthcare, subsidized gasoline, etc. Is giving things away for free only OK when its not his industry involved? All the same arguments about shortage and low quality apply to any industry where satisfying the customer's needs is decoupled from getting paid.