Why stand against linking?

Hmmmm…..

your hobby horse is leaving the barn and you aren’t even riding it. Congrats! Easy now paring and shaping your next gift to the commons, and for heaven’s sake don’t make it a rider. OTOH…….

I’m all for Murdoch pulling his content from Google. Clinging to old-school ideas is a great self-destructive approach to business and I can’t think of any organization’s self-destruction that would have a more positive effect on the world.

This Murdoch quote says it all:

“They shouldn’t have had it free all the time, and I think we’ve been asleep. It costs us a lot of money to put together a newspaper.”

That’s right buddy boy… you keep right on thinking boneheaded ideas like that. Keep your old school head tucked right there up your butt and focus your brown shirts on monetizing the old-school way and you should be bankrupt by the end of 2010. Go get-em Murdoch!

My fingers are crossed

I’m guessing it’s to force people to actually go through a toll booth to the paid site in order to find out what’s even in there. With linking, Google or another aggregator can basically summarize all the headlines, and reassemble the paper – even if it’s missing the main content lower down.

Plus, it allows Google or other news aggregators to make sure they’ve got all the headlines that matter. The value of the scoop diminishes.

Finally, I think it’s his way of saying that if more than a few major news agencies did this, then Google would no longer have access to everything that matters. The one-stop-shop would be broken.

What Michael Janzen said.

Live by the sword, die by the sword. Let the old mafia keep their monopoly, and let them take it to their grave.

Supporting the business ‘rights’ of the old news cartel — against the enormous and necessarily unpredictable benefits that fair use reserves for the masses — is an opinion that casts you in a very unfavourable light as a technologist.

Douglas: I’m kind of surprised by your take on this. To me it seems as though Murdoch’s fantasy of a Google free world is more about preserving an aging and increasingly ineffective corporate framework in the face of a technology that stimulates populist, human-scale, person-to-person information sharing.

Personally I have a hard time seeing how perpetuating the institutionalized perspective of the newspaper is preferred to the development of a robust and informed community of individual perspectives. I’m all for preserving good journalism, but I think the way to do that is to embrace the realities on the ground – “vivisection-by-search” is simply the state of play. People are getting off on creating their own stories, their own perspectives, their own front page – why would they want to go back to letting an over paid, over fed, editorial committee put together a string of marginally relevant stories for them? Why would a smart journalist want them to?

I don’t get your view either, especially compared to pages 189-190 of Life, Inc (exposure to the free market corrupts journalism).

Murdoch’s plan also seems irrelevant: I can imagine bloggers getting web traffic by scanning their newspaper subscriptions to text: enough people doing this would make it reliable.

This seems like just one of the many sticking points of “free internet” vs. “our particular economic system”, with you reversing your usual position.

But I’ve misinterpreted before.

Hey Regular Reader. Those two pages are indeed part of the crux of the chapter “From Ecology to Economy.” The next two pages make it even more clear that corporate cash is still king.

You, Michael, Laroquod & mika have thoroughly digested one key (albeit mildly proposed) premise of Life Inc: Corporatism deepens inequality, cheapens liberté and severely limits fraternité. Add to that, it is completely unsustainable.

Not many people seem to really understand the beginning of Life Inc, as it came to be written. The highest crime is not the mugging. The most difficult task is not the toppling of the corporate muggers who prowl about in some conspiratorial darkness. The problem is gentrified (and a host of other) junkies forced to comply with corporatist values, blogging on and on about freedom and rights until it is their property, their value, their job, their health insurance.

In this thread, in Doug’s latest piece (if i am not mistaken) amidst all the other tropes, Journalism and Aggregation are the principle movers. Great journalism aggregates & Aggregators (algorithmic and merely human) are determinate. We can already see from the mass of commentary at the Daily Beast that our brothers and sisters have nearly as many stratagems for aggregation as they have tastes for journalisms. And since they are all so very much brothers and sisters the energies that pour into these added tropes and discourses barely seems containable. As a matter of fact, it is essentially blinding. But, if we remain calm, i think we can find a way.

Aggregation takes time and effort. Change, decision-making and action take more time and effort. Tethered as i am to our brothers and sisters and even aspects of junk peddling corporatism, what can i say, what can i know, what can i hope for or desire for myself, the aggregator/journalist & the other, the journalist/aggregator?

It is by turns we are what we are to each other. Once, more present before the actual state of affairs than another. Once again, more factual. Another time, more understanding. Sometimes, even, more loved or loving than the other. After many days, perhaps near the end of the day, how can we ever know, “Were we all we could have been when we were these? Giving and receiving these and of each other?

Datta.
Or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHSps1UBOh0
Dayadhvam.
Or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6H7Ev3EZxE
Damyata.
Or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Vqk_EacCs

Keep at it Doug!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yai4bier1oM&feature=related

There are scenes
There are blues
There are boots
There are shoes
[.......................]
Cook the leather
Put it on me
Does it fit me
Or you?
It looks tighter on you.

Exposure to the free market does hurt many forms of journalism. But the Google-free universe of aggregated media isn’t any less corporate than Murdoch-land. It’s just increasingly uncompensated.

I know it’s counterintuitive to support anything Murdoch does or says – and he no doubt does not mean well for any of us in the long run. But his idea of just staying out of the search world did make me think. (And Murdoch did pay for a couple of my explicitly anti-Murdoch books to be published.)

I instinctively agree with Corey Doctorow and all the everything-wants-t0-be-free ethos of the net. But now that I’m living with it, I realize it’s not all that. The tendency is for everything to be stripped and parsed, not taken in any original context or even form. Hell, even my interview for a movie about Protocols of the Elders of Zion has been mashed up by David Duke supporters to promote neo-nazi themes.

I don’t know that as a content creator I am obligated for everything to be free to everyone in any form, particularly when others are extracting value from what I write, and I’m not. People get angry that I don’t release every book as some open source thing – when all I really want is to be asked for a book directly before I send it off for free. Or consulted before it is revised and resold by someone else. There’s no Creative Copyright License scheme that supports my own desire simply to have direct contact with those with whom I share my work.

There are plenty of sites that have aggregated work that I put up here for free – yet they have Google ads from which money is being made. Many writers – quality writers – can no longer afford to write or investigate. And it’s not that money isn’t being made off their writing; it’s that the companies making money selling hardware or access or something else use my content and labor as the way they earn money.

Murdoch’s deeper argument, whether or not he’s making it in earnest, is that resistance is not futile. One can create content that isn’t released to the Google-searchable universe. Yes, one does it as his own peril, and this reduces access. But to even suggest the possibility goes so against the assumption that everything everyone writes, records, or shoots should be free for anyone to watch and any company to exploit for profit, is valuable.

I don’t think your either/or argument stands up. It’s not a question of either protect and restrict or give away for free – it’s a question of whether or not we as content creators choose to live inside the reality of the day and work within the technological framework of the internet or whether we choose to marginalize ourselves. You seem to be dismissing the possibility that content creators, authors, artists, can engage the “Google-searchable universe” and come away with anything approaching independent financial success. Sure there’s no clear formula for new media success like there is for old media success, but I can’t imagine that retrenching into the protection of a corporatist distribution agenda is a way to find one. There has to be a middle path here, no?

I think this is what Douglas would very much like to see worked out. It is not necessarily a “middle path.” The “reality of the day” is an organised corporate patent system beside an unorganised ideal of face to face exchange for a certain amount of real work. In the software world this is nicely managed (occasionally) with shareware or donationware. I should think there are other ways users can and should be able to express their thanks and give support to creators: maybe involving some kind of new currency? So, sure, Google can get a great piece of the action, not only by linking the content, but by endorsing and facilitating a system of exchange. This would crimp google’s style because Murdoch would be at the door with his hand out. OTOH, if consumer/aggregator/bloggers/etc have a direct route to the journalists at the scene, they may be able to support their favourite journalism this way. Sounds like a real free market almost: the more hits or use of a piece would also be very revealing about the factuality and usefulness of the piece. Then, with much more ease, we could all track broad trends in truth, spin and outright lying in your face ideology. No?

-mason

Mr. R: So, google – and other aggregators – generate profit for themselves through contextless extracts, betraying the promise of free information idealism.

Instead of “producing”, web-enabled people just make/consume/comment on copies – piracy instead of content creation?

Mason: “Not many people seem to really understand the beginning of Life Inc … The problem is gentrified … junkies forced to comply with corporatist values”.

You mentioned that Life, Inc’s main objection was against how people internalise corporate values: yeah, but what I got out of it was that we’ve forgotten that our economic system is historically contingent – nothing about the universe per se makes us operate this way.

So, you’re saying Life Inc’s main point is that we’ve internalised corporate values? Yeah – but that only happened because the values “receded into the background, like an operating system” (paraphrase) and passed themselves off as features of the universe, right?

My main takeaway from the book was that the economy is a made-up game, and we’re the only thing stopping ourselves from changing and improving it.

We should be working towards the end of Testament, towards Bertrand-Russell-style pin production (http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html), towards the luxurious, hyper-technological egalitarian leisure society the 60’s hoped for – or at least the one midway through Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.

But I guess Doug’s arguing for some kind of payment plan for journalists: even if “money” is just a dumb, historically contingent idea, we still have to make sure someone other than huge corporate chiefs and asian factory owners can buy groceries until history ends in post-scarcity happiness for everyone (/metasarcasm).

Erm, meant to delete the paragraph starting with “you mentioned that”.

Mmmm. Nicely laid out RR. And, yes, our economic system is for all practical purposes just what you say, completely artificial. Money too is largely and increasingly artificial, but it has deep if principally symbolic roots in the real.

Who knows if money can be restored to its roots? (metambivalence)

If Doug’s payment system works it will certainly be indicative of and sustained by a re-awakening of consciousness to both the real and (by a certain logical extension) the symbolic. And that’s to be desired.

But to dither about hoping for a promised post scarcity abundance is madness, murderous and masochistic. Everyone, according to his abilities, must cease feeding the beast. That is why each must receive according to his needs from our better angels.

-mason

test

History lesson: for years, the WSJ was not in Google. Google worked just fine without it, and this was even before the concerns that blogs were somehow vivisecting the WSJ. And the WSJ got along just fine without Google.

Of course, Murdoch’s talking about taking all of News Corp out of Google. Not sure how much I’ll miss Fox News no being there. But the point is, life will likely go on for both players just fine if he makes the move.

When you write this:

“Murdoch understands is that a revolt against the free will take more than erecting a subscriber login between a Google link and a story. All the login does is push the user to find an alternative source for the information—some other publication’s free link.”

This makes no sense. Right now, Murdoch’s publications voluntarily chose to let people coming from Google access some selected paid content for free. He could change that today and put up the barrier and still be in Google. But then, as you suggest, that simply means they’ll look for the news elsewhere. So if he’s not in Google at all, they’re still going to look for the news elsewhere, aren’t they?

Not if the story is exclusive to the publication that hasn’t opened itself to Google.

Let’s play this out a little more specifically.

The WSJ gets an exclusive story, let’s say about some CEO doing insider trading. The story is not open to Google.

Various bloggers have access to the WSJ. They pay for a subscription. They summarize the story. So does the New York Times, the Associated Press and so on. These are things that all happen now.

So now someone hears about this story. They’re not a WSJ subscriber. They go to Google, do a search, and the end up not at the WSJ but instead at one of its competitors.

How did the WSJ win in this?

The WSJ has a relatively select audience that’s going to read it each day, because for that audience, it provide a nice daily digest of news they want. A far larger audience is never, ever going to go to the WSJ — not even for exclusives.

If the WSJ isn’t in Google, well, no loss, I suppose. The audience that wants them will seek them out. But that audience already is seeking them out, I’d content. Cutting off Google cuts them off from receiving direct links, direct page view, direct traffic that actually also does still help pay their bills, as well.

When Murdoch bought the Journal everyone said he was buying a dying medium. Today it has overtaken USA Today as the largest paper in the US and the only large paper with a continued growth in readership.

When Murdoch bought the Journal, everyone said he lavishly overpaid for it. Now it’s worth ever more.

When Murdoch said the Journal was going to switch to a pay site, all of you armchair quarterbacks said it didn’t stand a chance, and Murdoch was going to be the biggest laughing-stock failure on the web. Today the WSJ’s freemium model is the envy of the industry.

Now Murdoch is the only one with the chutzpah to take on international monopolist, Google, and you dopes can’t stumble over each other fast enough to pronounce your certainty of his failure.

More power to Murdoch. Perhaps he may not succeed with this, but all of you are talking politics instead of business sense. You don’t like the political slant of his news-outlets, so you criticize his business acumen. Fools.

Hey ChrisG,

Rushkoff was not criticising Mordred’s business acumen, but rather citing this maneuver to make a point about compensating authors and artists. Like half the threads here, this one is splintered in a few directions. Your view is a good comment (in any case) on a few of the ways the topic of Mordred (generally) has been treated in this forum.

But i’m just another armchair quarterback rocking all night long listening to Mohammed’s Radio.
I’ve “been up all night listening for his drum
Hoping that the righteous might just might just might just come.”

Wishing you and your’s all the gasoline and meat you can burn and eat. Keep your lamp down low and if that ain’t enough check out what i was able to find!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9dapcQ_erY

-mason

Test comment.

“If Bloomberg *&* The Journal go to Bing then i gotta go to Bing.”

Or should Bing get AP, Reuters *&* Gannett

ZDNet Editor in Chief Larry Dignan ruminates.

http://i.techrepublic.com.com/downloads/tbq008.mp3?tag=leftCol;post-3406

Let’s see if Microsoft wants to get into bed with Mordred.

“Rashi [ ] gives a parable of a body of very hot water that people are looking at, standing afar, afraid to go in. That is, until someone else goes in first. The first person entering, although himself scalded, cools the waters, allowing everyone else to follow.”

The situation, of course (in a pure business sense), is more complicated than this. Add in Doug’s concerns about compensation for producers and some heavy ironies get heavier.

-mason