Content Is Becoming a Commodity
Over the weekend, it seemed that everyone in the tech blogosphere contributed to the discussion around fractured blog comments; Robert Scoble even went so far as to say that the "era of blogger's control" is over. What all these discussions hinged on was whether or not a web service called Shyftr had the right to appropriate bloggers' RSS feeds and build their brand around our content (a practice they've now modified due to this outcry).
However, it's not just bloggers who are dealing with the appropriation of our content, a practice whose implications imply that our words hold little value on their own. In fact, in today's society, devaluation of content is becoming the norm.
It's up to us to decide whether to fight this change or ride the wave.
The Value of a Blog
In a post entitled "What Are My Words Worth?", blogger Steven Hodson worried about the devaluation of his brand, saying:
"We are being told that once we have written our posts we no longer have any say over what happens to them. In effect we are having to give up the vary basis of what gives our brand its very worth...So as we watch our pageviews and revenue streams decline because it’s now okay that the conversations can either be taken over by other services...It’s okay that someone else can build a brand off of our now non-important brand. It’s okay that any conversations over our original thoughts can take place anywhere because the home we have worked hard to build for our brand isn’t worth anything anymore."
What this speaks to is a blogger's fear that this type of shift will lead to a devaluation in a blogger's brand. Effectively, their content is now the commodity that other services can utilize or exploit to build up brands of their own.
Content in Today's Society
It's not just bloggers whose content is being used, shared, and profited from today - perhaps now bloggers can begin to appreciate what other industries, like the recording industry or the movie-making industry, has had to face in this new digital age.
How did it come to this? Jonathan Handel, a digital media, entertainment and technology lawyer posts on his blog about the nature of content in today's society.
He sees six reasons for content's devaluation (to paraphrase):
- Supply and Demand: The supply of online content has grown enormously in the past decade, including user-generated content, a bunch of which includes content created by people who don't care if they get paid for its creation.
- Loss of Physical Form: When you steal an object (like a DVD, for example), you deny it to the owner. When you "steal" a movie, by downloading it, it's still there for others to use. Its intangible nature makes its appropriate feel much less like stealing.
- It's Easy: Getting content from the internet is far easier than through traditional methods.
- New Media is Ad-Supported: The "freemium" model makes content available at no cost to the user - so why should the user see the content as valuable?
- Market Forces: Computers and web services are more valuable when more content is available, and non-professionals flock to use the new technologies of the web, as they had long been denied access to distribution via traditional methods.
- Culture: A generation of users has grown up indifferent or even hostile to copyright.
What It All Means
What this means for us as bloggers and new media creators is that the very technologies that we have grown to love are the same forces that are turning our efforts, be them our words, our videos, our music, our photos, or anything we create, into a commodity - something that has little monetary value on its own, but in aggregate, can become something of value.
Case in point: iTunes. Individually, the songs are inexpensive, but by combining them and providing the downloading service, iTunes rules the digital music landscape - something old media is not fond of. Take NBC Universal's Jeff Zucker and his infamous railing against Apple as being a corrosive force in the media business: "We don't want to replace the dollars we were making in the analog world with pennies on the digital side."
We may have scoffed at his concerns at the time, but now, bloggers are feeling those same forces at work on our own content, as it gets sucked into other services, making our individual contributions nothing more than a droplet in the stream that is new media.
However, we can't on the one hand support the commoditization of other media - happy to download music either via P2P or for pocket change and cry when DRM restricts its copying - and then, at the same time, purport that our very own creations, like our blog posts, or even more absurdly, the comments around those posts, have some sort of value that is above and beyond them becoming commodities as well.
Other Impacts
Handel also comes to the conclusion that the abundance of content is not necessarily good for users. "When everyone's a creator, there's less room for high-quality professional content," he says.
While it may seem like there is less room for high quality content, I would argue that there's still just as much room, it's just harder to find the best stuff because it's mixed in with the rest. Information overload, you could call it.
That's why services that can help you find quality content, whether an RSS recommendation service like Toluu, or a recommendation-based search engine like the upcoming Delver, will be the next-gen tools for the digital age.
Conclusion
As media creators and consumers, we have to realize that content is a commodity now - it's too late to fight this trend, so we need to just make the best of it.
I think Mark Evans hits on a good idea on his post "Shyftr's Lessons for Bloggers" saying that if it's so important to you that your blog retains value of its own, then make it a destination:
"Use cool widgets, blog asides, newsletters, polls and, of course, a user-friendly design. Whatever it takes to convince people that visiting your blog is worth it can only be a good thing."
Agreed. Without some sort of interactivity or blog-only content, readers will find themselves consuming your content off-site more than ever in the coming days.
All that's left to decide is where you stand. Should information (even yours!) be free? Is your motto "steal my content, please?" Or will you fight this disruption and try to cling to the old model like the RIAA and MPAA did? Or maybe you think there is still some middle ground to be had. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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Great article, Sarah.
The divide between producing/consuming is such an interesting topic. Like one of my friends said this weekend: if you were to legitimately fill your iPod with music that would cost you between $10,000 and $30,000 dollars.
The times, they be a changin'.
Sarah
I very thought provoking post.
However I don't think the future of good quality content is bleak at all. Indeed there is so much rubbish on the internet that websites that are really focused on serving a niche with well written content will grow and prosper.
I find myself returning to the same content websites regularly (e.g. www.smashingmagazine.com). I want to get the information from the horses mouth, not mixed up with mediocre and irrelevant content on some aggreagtion site.
I continually add new sites to my feeds, but very few maintain the quality to remain and get removed.
I believe good quality content and writers with real knowledge and authority will always find a loyal following.
The folks at Mollom (http://mollom.com) are looking to tackle some of this. They are building a 'content quality assessment tool' for user-generated content. Looks quite interesting to me.
I have been following the Zimbabwean elections very closely. It has been hard for foreign journalists to visit. Some have, at risk to their lives.
What has concerned me is that most reports that came out, despite the immense risk, were based on gossip and second hand reports. Analysis and structure was noticeably missing suggesting that perhaps reporters didn't know what questions to ask in the first place.
This is an unusual crucible, I know. None the less it became very clear that there are about 5 original sources of data and every thing else has been a pyramid of comment upon comment. I have been relaying bare events (follow my link) and you will see the bareness.
The reason for my relay BTW was partly for me to follow events and distinguish fact from fiction but also to play the social role of increasing the chance of people finding news and pointing them to the source. - awful sentence.
So how does this relate to your article? There is a market niche for solid content and for dividing up the supply chain - selling good content to a popular sit. Then let them protect it. This is a big opportunity and as the industry matures, this is what I would expect to happen.
Comparing MPAA and RIAA to this is a lame argument. What Shyftr is doing is replicating the music CDs and wrapping them with their own branding and selling them. Is this happening to music industry, no.
Legacy journalists still don't get it. Traditional editors control the news, press release flow, letters to the editor. Oligopoly control of circulation gives them the power.
Online, users have more choice. Users have freedom to opine, self express. Cross linked blogs become hot conversations that bring loyal followings together in virtual conferences - spontaneously.
Can legacy thinkers adjust to the world of shared conversations?
It's true that all informational products tend to deflate in value. The same can also be said of the non-material aspects of real-world products (production costs, economies of scale, labor savings through outsourcing, etc.).
While capitalists may suffer as things become harder to get rich off of, consumers tends to collectively benefit from this deflation because they get more with less.
The problem is that primary costs of living, such as power, housing, and raw material costs, aren't deflating in value over the long term. For some reason, it seems like for society to really get better, something needs to be done to reduce these core costs of living. In the next hundred years we'll probably figure out a way to dramatically reduce the cost of energy. The same probably can't be said for land and environmental resources unfortunately. So what's the solution?
I've always thought of my blog posts as open source content that can be mixed and re-used. With open source software you make your money at the edges by creating a common ecosystem. But you don't make any money off the software, because you have to give it away so that it can be of value to as many people as possible.
My blog has personal value; as a searchable knowledge repository that has been annotated by many others, therefore increasing its value to me. I never could see a real business model for my blog, other than as a supplement or an accelerator to the other things I do. A blog has to be very wide to get the traffic necessary to generate serious ad revenue. And when it does that, it becomes a commodity.
I'm seeing this same trend in education and training, especially in e-learning. Learning content has little value. Context - such as peers, professors, certification or recognition - is where the real value lies.
Sounds like some bloggers never understood open source business models.
The conversation around this is definitely hot-button: Chris Anderson, Kevin Kelley, et. al.: all about finding ways to earn money for our activities in an age where it's easier and easier for anyone to create, distribute and take (i.e. not pay for) content.
I'd be hard-pressed to think anybody is ok with someone repacking and selling content that someone else produced.
The broader question is whether we can even make money by producing content.
My thought: you can steal content, but you can't steal me.
Thus: stop trying to make money off protected content, turn to make money off the "experience of me".
When 5,000 bloggers write about making money online, it's rather hard to avoid commoditization of content.
Something to consider, though: you can copy someone's words, but it's harder to copy their tone, ideas, and point of view without inadvertently identifying the original source. I can do a decent Seth Godin imitation, but I can't get it 100% right. However, if you read his words, even under a different author's name, it's hard to mistake who really wrote them.
As for the rest of us, I think Mark Evans and other writers have got it right - we need to keep working on drawing people to our blogs. If only I knew how to make a widget. :)
Thoughts, ideas and conversations are not commodities. A business model that fully reproduces someone else's creation without permission doesn’t feel right.
This is a funny coincidence - I just commented on Jonathan's column with a video called 'conteXt is king', see
http://www.mediafuturist.com/2008/04/new-video-on-co.html
....while I totally agree on his assessment that content has in and of itself - i.e. as a mere digital file copy - become economically devalued, I believe that there is also some cause for renewed 'regal' aspirations in the future of Content. If we expand the definition of content a bit and if we then include Context and Community as Content2.0 (so to speak), the future may look somewhat brighter.
However, the bottom line remains: Content used to be 100% paid-for and now it's not. Now we must put Content in the middle and make money around it... well, ok, watch the video!
Your words might change the world, still you might end broke :)
Like those great writers in ancient times - they wrote great books, yet died unknown and hungry.
Sorry Jeff (knowing you said this long ago now), but every new generation of digital technology knocks intermediary revenues down by ~90%. Microsoft used that to take over -- industry by industry. Now it's being done to them. There is no way way.
The proverbial genie has already escaped the bottle so there's not much that can be done.
That said, what I would like to see is a way for content producers to be compensated in some way by services such as Shyftr that use their content as a pillar for their running the business. Not sure how it would work - maybe something based on clicks, pageviews, etc. I think Steve Hodson does a good job articulating many of the issues that need to be tackled.
And for what it's worth, the problem of content being shared in so many others other than the original blog is going to really impact players such as TechCrunch, GigaOm and RWW given they heavily rely on page views to attract advertising.
Mark
This is the zero-sum power struggle between content creators vs distribution channels moving creeping the digital world.
This is not just a problem for bloggers.
This fellow wrote 200,000 books all using content he grabbed from the web.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/business/media/14link.html?em&ex=1208318400&en=5be22877da9dbc99&ei=5087%0A
Among the books published under his name are “The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea” ($24.95 and 168 pages long); “Stickler Syndrome: A Bibliography and Dictionary for Physicians, Patients and Genome Researchers” ($28.95 for 126 pages); and “The 2007-2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India” ($495 for 144 pages).
Next up? Romance novels.
@Mark Evans: Here's an analogy to add to your thought: newspapers subscribe to wire services (AP, Reuters) to get daily, generic content. Consider a blog network providing that service to startups looking for content.
Let me start out by saying that nobody in their right mind would steal the content off my blog. It isn't good enough to steal. And if they did steal it and posted somewhere else then maybe I could get the satisfaction that it was being read...YEAH!!!
It is easy to steal a lot of content becuase so much of it looks the same. If you read what is posted in a lot of the most popular blogs it already looks like it is being shared or stolen or changed by a few words and being reposted.
All of the idiots that were screaming like little green baby pigs about music being free on the internet are now screaming like little green baby pigs that their hard work is being taken for free. Be careful what you wish for. There is no free lunch. Sooner or later you will pay!!
Live From Las Vegas
The Masked Millionaire
What a foolish thing to say, or even imply. You're basically saying that we should be passive, wring our hands and whine about the unfairness of it all, because a few A listers have made some universal decision about This Is The Way It Will Be.
We have actions. We can only provide partial feeds. If our writing, our photos, or other fruits of our creation are copied, we have legal recourse.
I have to say, if you value your writing so little that you don't care what happens to it, then why write? Why not do something where you end valuing the results of your labor?
All that's left is to call bunk on such absurd generalizations.
Places like Shyftr are stealing page views, thus add revenue, from bloggers sites. Shame on them. Either remove your rss feed and rely on on search engine hits, or encourage developers to develope an anti-robot switch that restricts specific sites from picking up the feed. Vote with the switch, then advertise your actions in your blogs to encourage others.
Fractured conversation is a big issue. I much conversation in Twitter that doesn't connect back to the blog post the discussion surrounds. FriendFeed's on site comments further splinters the conversation, especially if someone replies to a Twitter comment about a blog post on FriendFeed.
We can all benefit from a service that pulls all of these conversational loose ends into a common discussion thread. I don't think the answer is as much a service problem as a message interoperability problem. I could see a Wordpress plugin that pulls in Twitter comments and FriendFeed comments into the comments area of the blog that the conversation is anchored around. I could see FriendFeed offering a mirrored view of this conversation with each reply being allowed to live in it's originating service and simply aggregated at each end point of the discussion.
So, anybody working on that? :)
To ask the classic economic question 'Who benefits'?
For all the stuff about creators 'finding new business models' why do only see venture capitalists backing distribution businesses? Where's the start-up leaping on the idea that their published authors could be making their money from personal appearances and book signings, rather than the books they write?
It's all very well saying that it's nice to see the capitalists out of the content business, but those publishers and labels are the venture capitalists of creativity - the people who let someone go from working 1-2hrs an evening working on a sideline, to taking it full-time, without taking 100% of the risk themselves. DIY can only replace so much - ask bands caught in the limbo of having to work full-time, such that any touring has to be done by taking a holiday from work. There is a huge 'funding gap' between being able to tour 20-25 days a hear, and the 100 days+ you need to be doing at the mid-level (and that is before you start regarding recordings as a promotional cost, rather than something you can sell to help subsidise your hobby).
Feeds and web-service APIs have always struck me as the point where a lot of 'new business models' were going to fall down anyway - although site-scraping was always going to be another risk. The fact that we have failed to find any workable model other than ad-subsidised commercial broadcasting is the single biggest concern.
The logical answer, as proposed by Ted Nelson in the 60s, would be micro-payments (which would encourage you to lower costs to maximise readership) but unfortunately no one's developed a viable model there, for a variety of good reasons.
I find this hilarious. Bloggers are saying some of the same thing's as the musicians are saying, now that it's happening to them. It's easy to laugh and mock when it's not your money!
Just like you use winamp to play your music instead of a band specific music player with google-ads on it, life online is changing. As always, there will be some big players serving content to the many. What this means, however, is that the site as we know it is changing. Why spend money on seo, design etc if the content is king? Again, it's lowering the bar for good content.
The site is dead. Get over it.
Shelley, you wrote: "What a foolish thing to say, or even imply. You're basically saying that we should be passive, wring our hands and whine about the unfairness of it all, because a few A listers have made some universal decision about This Is The Way It Will Be.
We have actions. We can only provide partial feeds. If our writing, our photos, or other fruits of our creation are copied, we have legal recourse.
I have to say, if you value your writing so little that you don't care what happens to it, then why write? Why not do something where you end valuing the results of your labor?"
RM: I think you missed the point of Sarah's argument. We value our content a lot, but you have to participate fully in the new media ecosystem, and that means providing full feeds. Sure providing partial feeds would be a solution, but not a very good one IMHO. For this blog, it's almost expected that we provide full text given what we write about. But also it provides so much opportunity for remixes or mashups, etc. Sure there are lots of spam blogs that copy our content, but you have to take the good with the bad. I'm not saying I like everything about providing a full feed, but Sarah's point is that we have to adapt.
Bottom line, you shouldn't judge other people. Just because a partial feed works for you, and we don't provide partial feeds, doesn't mean we don't value our content. We just have different ways of participating in this media world.
Shelley when you say "All that's left is to call bunk on such absurd generalizations", I think you need to look at your own absurd generalizations.
Re Sean: "The site is dead. Get over it."
I used to say something similar, but the reality is that sites are not dead - not even close. If anything, feeds and mashups etc make sites even more important.
This is old news. Anyone who has been paying any attention to intellectual property issues as impacted by technology will recognize these arguments as old hat. Heck, I remember the same things were said when photocopiers were first brought into libraries.
I do like the recommendation of making destinations like blogs more valuable, though.
With all due respect, I find this article to reflect the very reasons why blog content is actually at threat. It so typically attempts to probe a difficult and deep topic (commodification) using only whatever populist tools are available -- mostly popular opinion.
Though I do understand. If you attempted to write fully about ths topic, how many readers would persist? The only strategy that seems to remain is to staple together some vaguely familiar notions, sort of "wholesale" versus "retail" that, again with respect, I don't think have much to do with commodification.
There is a whole big thick book written about commodification, its meaning and influence on society. It was written by a guy called Charlie Marx, and is titled "Das Kapital".
Marx, and just about every economist since, with variations, has seen the principal feature of a commodity not, as you state, "something that has little monetary value on its own, but in aggregate, can become something of value", but rather as something which is differentiated solely by price. (Again with respect, I find your definition odd to the point of bewilderment; if we speak of the commoditization of the automotive industry, do we mean that one car alone is not worth much, but five or six together are?)
I do have some sympathy with your dilemma, however: how can something already "free" be differentiated on price? The answer is that money does not adequately reflect what is meant by price. In the case of blogs the "coin of the realm" is actually time and attention. Hence the success and attraction of those who aggregate blogs, as they reduce the time and attention necessary to follow a specific topic. So what is going on here, I would like to suggest, is not that somehow offering a "six-pack" of blogs automatically produces value, but rather what is being offered is a greater density of information when viewed from a more narrow, defined perspective. The return per minute of attention is greater, and thus the economic value increases.
You can see the same effect in the information industry at large. For example, the companies currently doing very well are the information aggregators, such as Factiva, LexisNexis and so forth. Google is doing outstandingly well. But the actual information producers, the newspapers and newsagencies, and faring quite poorly, with projected growth of under 1% for 2008. One might also cite the recent legal case brought by Reuters against Moreover. Google for it; it's quite interesting.
What solutions can we find? As a general principal, it is better to think about going forward, than trying to dam up the future somehow. As a technologist following falteringly and sometimes ineffectually in the footsteps of giants such as Douglas Engelbart and Alan Kay, I can only suggest that bloggers need to defeat the aggregators at their own game. If a content resource could be centralized that accepted categorized/tagged RSS feeds from bloggers everywhere, allowing readers to easily access content on specific vectors, value could be returned easily to bloggers. The RSS feeds would contain a decent summary of each item posted, and to read the full item the readers would have to go to the blog site.
Of course to accept such a solution, bloggers would need also to accept that the "reader" as we think of him/her from print days, is not as common today. Most "readers" are not interested in your specific blog, but rather in a specific topic/vector.
Oddly, given the personal nature of many blogs, that notion may be harder to accept than the notion of losing a great deal of economic benefit. Writing is intensely personal, person-to-person; I'm not sure that this still dominates in reading, at least of information.
Cheerio.
This is well reasoned and insightful. Ultimately, you deserve to remain in control of your content and how it is shared and/or not shared. Technologies and laws will have to provide more tools to allow us to remain in control of our own content in the future.
The issue is more with the brand and the value of the band created by these individuals than just the words. And it goes beyond just blogs. What's the value of a review on Amazon? a story on Digg that gets thousand of votes? or a video on YouTube that has been viewed millions of times?
That's why we have created www.traackr.com: to try to help content producers put a value to their on-line contributions. This is the first step in understanding the worth of your brand and starting monetizing it.
I just recently read Clay Shirky's *Here Comes Everybody*. He says that the value of *professional* content is reduced when the services of that professional are not as scarce. The availability of expertise/writing from bloggers to some extent reduces the perceived scarcity and thus value of the official purveyers of expertise/writing. There is a squeeze on the professionals. This is playing out.
Secondly, information is digital and thus easily copied, disseminated and repurposed. That tends to drive the price down again.
But I don't like the word commodity. People still see differences it is just that many of us like the authenticity, for example, of bloggers compared to official big media sources. Of course, things have played out further and now there are all these A-list bloggers plus Aggregator blogs like Tech Crunch, Engadget, Tech Meme, etc. with people making their living blogging
I'm on the C-list at best as a blogger. So, generally, I'm all in favor of the little content provider. The commenter. I'm into these tools that are going to let me own my own comments. I like friendfeed and wish a bigger excerpt of blog posts was included right there for our discussion. I like the forum of friendfeed - the comradery, the salon. As long as attribution is made to the blogger, I think the reputation of the blogger and brand is enhanced in these off-blog uses. I do think, though, that the commenter is caught in the middle because now she wants her comments on friendfeed to get possibly greater exposure or exposure where she wants the exposure instead of on the blog off somewhere in obscurity relative to the her chosen reference group (friendfeed friends).
I favor efforts to find a way for the comments to somehow be piped back to the blog from other settings if possible as it really would be a shame for all the blog comments to be sprinkled about in a way that is less powerful for the conversation.
I do think the amateurs among us like myself who are meeting their income needs elsewhere should respect and honor the concerns of bloggers who are working harder at blogging that we are and are needing to get a fair bit or all of their livelihood from it. But, I also object to the idea that I don't *need* remuneration. If there is remuneration, I want a tiny little slice too unless it is just silly. Right now I am happy to settle for less because I get a lot in return including reputation, social networking benefits, connection and conversation.
Great topic,
If I jump off the Golden Gate Bridge I pretty much know I'm not going to make it alive. Same thing goes for the Internet, if you write content its only a copy and paste away from spreading. So know the consequences before you play the game.
Personally, if I create a great piece about about cradle to cradle design, and it was picked up and copied I would be stoked! To me thats like a burp after a meal, a sign of satisfaction. We are at a point at which you should know people are going to take your stuff and run with it. Is it right, is it wrong? Depends on what you want to protect and why, but then again I'm into promoting ideas that will save humanity, create opportunities for people, and I don't value money very highly.
Interesting subject Sarah, have to disagree though.
Content is not becoming a commodity nor is brands (bloggers) in danger of being devalued. If you managed to build a brand (credibility and network) and you have customers (readers that find value) your content is not in danger of being a commodity because of the shear volume out there nor is your brand being devalued if used somewhere else (even if profited for others). Key is like with any other brand, if you provide value for your target audience they will be loyal. Agree with Mark Evans, add an branded experience can only help, but this is marketing... Now, I can't see why openness and sharing would be a problem? Just a different challenge which can lead to even bigger rewards because of the openness and global reach.
Thanks for providing great value.
/M
What matters is the purpose of your blog. If you want to spread the word out, it's only better that the content is becoming commodity for everybody to use and build upon. If you want to monetize on your content, it's a different story. I'd say, let them copy the whole thing, but embed your ads right into the text. Besides, if it's RSS readers that use your content, it means you're still in control of the post. If you edit it, it'll change on Shyftr too. So why not track where it's displayed and if it gets a lot of hits, embed your own ad content in there?
Since Television opened the gate of the electronic era, information has been made available for free for the end-user...
The question is not if information should be "eaten" for free, it is rather : should content producer be paid for their work ?
And well, the answer is yes ! Yes they should !
Wether they are paid by bigger networks for using their content to build their brand or by ads taking into account all those new "consumers" reached by those bigger websites, one thing is for sure : journalist don't work for free on TV networks, and so don't bloggers in the bloggosphere...
Is information a tangeible consumer good ? Yes and no..
Information has always been available both for money and for free. While the wall street journal made their readers pay for thorough articles, alternative newspapers edited by students, for exemple, were given for free. Speech is free too, and that's free information..
But if you want to make a living out of content-producing, then you should be very clear that any use of your content is subject to copy-rights and should be paid in a way of another.
My advice to professional bloggers ? Let the fools work for free if they like it and try your best to produce a better content than them (hell ! make it better than anybody !!!). People, individuals or corporations, blogs or big websites, will pay for it in the end : 'cause those that work for free won't be able to do it for long (being swept as they already are off of their readers by bigger websites and losing more and more ad revenue...)
But you will.
Who owns the content is where organizations like Creative Commons come in.
"Share, Remix, Reuse — Legally
Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved."
We're a nonprofit organization. Everything we do — including the software we create — is free."
http://creativecommons.org/
It may not prevent copyright violations, but it does at least give one some legal recourse.
Some thoughts regarding your post.
1) Many people in the tech and social media spaces are very focused (some jubilant) on becoming more viral and open through technology, blogs, etc. Typically, I find these folks complain about the recording industry's assault on those who illegally download music, and yet they lament the loss of value of their own content (whether words, audio or video) when it is taken and used by another source without attribution or payment. There is a definitive line between intellectual property and self-promotion, but too often we blur that line for our own immediate gratification. You're right, in a sense, that the loss of "physical form" plays a roll in the justification of stealing, but as we blog, produce video and other types of content, we need to give some thought as a society to how we protect what needs to be protected.
2) Your comment about how individually produced content has less of a value, but "in aggregate, can become something of value" has merit. ActiveAccess, a division of the company I work for, is a producer of a communications platform, a super-widget if you will. We've traditionally worked on widgets for clients, ie, radio stations, colleges and universities. This project is for a consumer market segment - a direct to consumer application. It's on the horizon, but one of our beliefs is that by coupling content together (RSS, etc) and establishing content partners, we can help build a portal for a community. The idea on our end though is two-fold... a) consolidate content and services into one place for the consumer / reader; and b) establish a revenue-sharing platform for content providers, ie bloggers, which should help expand their brand recognition and value.
3) Zucker's railing against Apple is an amusing one, but broadcast media has distinct advantages over new media that often gets overlooked by people in broadcast media. New media is certainly younger, faster and more agile in some respects, but in others - it lacks establishment, audience, capital and other benefits. Rick Ducey (BIAfn) commented on this to an extent (see Rick's blog post at: http://blog.bia.com/bia/?p=26). Rick is at the 2008 NAB Show, and believe me, broadcasters are intensely focused on social media, networks like Facebook, YouTube, etc. If you're interested in NAB - you can follow their blog at: http://www.NABShow.com/blog. They also have a Twitter feed that you can track. It's a great place to read about technology, media and other topics bloggers are interested in.
4) So, how do these two differing perspectives (one often associated with those in broadcast media and the other with those in new media) translate for bloggers in particular? Well, while you can't stop being viral or promoting yourself, you also have to examine how your intellectual property - because that's what we are talking about here - may be valued or better utilized elsewhere. If you are concerned about it being lifted and think that is going to happen, which certainly is taking place, one method is to seek out the established forces and team-up. Certainly, some people view Apple as a corrosive force, but people used to think of that way about Sears. Everyone feared the end of "Mom and Pop" stores. Then along came Wal-Mart, and the same fears were echoed again and again. Of course, we still have "Mom and Pop" stores. The point is that successful businesses learn from their landscape and find a way to either do something no one else is doing or they find a way to do it better. The same is true for bloggers.
5) Last thought, the idea of a blog as a "destination" is a good point. I did not read Mark Evans' post, but it sounds accurate. Essentially, this comes back to what I wrote in point 4 - you need to take more ownership of your material and know the marketplace. Of course, if you don't consider your content a commodity that you want to protect and profit from - that's a whole other issue. But if you do, then you need to treat it like any other business asset.
Content has ALWAYS been a commodity. Do you really think this is a new issue somehow? Professional writers have been dealing with this "free content" nonsense for years.
>>>Personally, if I create a great piece about about cradle to cradle design, and it was picked up and copied I would be stoked!
Well, this is a sure sign of an amateur writer. Professional writers SELL reprints of articles. And we REALLY don't like it when someone steals our work.
Cut-and-pasting is stealing, period.
There's this little thing called copyright....
The reason people disregard copyright is because it is too strict, in the US is is something like 100 years plus it can be inherited and through loopholes basically continued ad infinitum, by people whose only contribution is their ability to collect money.
If copyright was for 5 years period, and enforced with jail terms, then infringement would disappear. Knowledge, development and progress would increase dramatically.
Completely agree. But blogs can only become destinations when functionality rather than content is syndicated. So if I'm a travel writer with an audience I can embed Expedia's booking engine on my blog, such that the booking experience resides entirely within my blog pages. I get a commission for sales (and I'm transparent about this).
Actually, when you think about it anyone can be an intermediary (or agent, or broker). By combining services (or widgets, as they are called) from Cloud operators and web service brokers, they can build entirely new businesses, albeit with niche audiences. Wine buffs with mass followings can sign up new members to Virgin Wine Club - take a a margin. You get the point. Incalculable number of permutations and combinations of services and intermediaries.
The academics were right several years ago when they said that far from the web dis dis-intermediating it will actually create hypermediation giving rise to what they call cybermediaries.
In the social network space groups will be syndicated and embedded on the web sites and blogs of the members. A 2,000 member group could be on 200 different web sites with a join button.
Many brands don't the point. It isn't about creating destinations any more. It's about 'being everywhere'.
"A word to the wise. Decentralise".
Hi Sarah,
You've got it all wrong--There is no doubt that content is king. High quality content is getting tougher to find on the web because of the sheer volume of materials out there that are copied and amalgamated. The success of search engines like Google, which filter out irrelevant and copied content, is a testament to the importance of original material.
I'd say photo sharing web apps, RSS feels, and social networking engines have become a commodity.
Content rules.
Concerning the quality of content - the question is about blog posts versus long informative articles and how useful they are. Useit's Jacob blogged/wrote about this long time back
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/articles-not-blogs.html
I think content with full of original idea will drive people to read it, and discuss it.
Goo writers walways find their way to produce and sell content. I think however that Search engine companies should work better in defining the original content and to promote it.
Good article and comments.
Context is important, but all the other aspects of communcations and network are just as critical.
Agreed that we are ready for the next "wave"... blogging is just one step in the information evolution / revolution.
Good article and comments.
Context is important, but all the other aspects of communcations and network are just as critical.
Agreed that we are ready for the next "wave"... blogging is just one step in the information evolution / revolution.
I believe good and intelligent content can be powerful, on how it been translated into books, magazines and ezines material. Our ancient writers have missed the boat, regarding the World-Wide-Web on how content is used and makes a great commodity.
As others above have said in many different ways, hand wringing about what's happening doesn't help much.
It's clear some are making good money on content. In the attention economy, Drudge makes 7 figures annually. Hinchcliffe I'm sure does well as a consultant; his blogs function as a calling card. Arrington has a tremendous amount of clout.
In the content for money department, we just paid $6K for a 300-page research report. And it was worth it because it the information in it was credible and insightful.
Let's not criticise too much though - this article (and all bloggers actually) pretty much do the same as Shyftr - in that they aggregate post by other people. The difference is that good blogs (like this post shows) adds value by providing a 'takeaway' conclusion and summing up. No?
Great article.
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