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Google and Big Media's New Clothes |
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Dan Bricklin, co-creator of Visi-calc and all-around computer technology guru, has written a very nice sort essay on why individuals matter a lot more than Big Mediatm would like you to think (Small Players Matter) [via SATN].
While large players and big media companies act like they are the main reason for the web and Internet and therefore should drive policy decisions, the numbers show that the contributions of the myriad of small players -- individuals, non-profits, and small businesses -- are crucial to the vitality of the web and its value to people.
One of the main points that Bricklin makes is that Google is radically transforming the way people find information. Google is the work of millions of volunteers (whether they intend to be or not) who create web pages that link to what they find interesting and important. Google is transformative. Google is rocking Big Media's world. Google is creative destruction at its finest.
Why? Because Big Media is about three things: marketing, distribution and the back catalog (otherwise known as copyright concentration). Disney didn't buy ABC because of ABC's fine production facilities, or it stellar programming executives ("I know, let's rely entirely on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? for our programming lineup"). Disney bought ABC for its marketing and distribution capabilities. Copyright concentration was not so much an issue because much of ABC's most popular material is in fact owned by other production companies.
Google and blogs (i.e., Instapundit, Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Kausfiles, etc.) are turning the marketing and distribution world upside down. Big Media relies on its marketing and distribution muscle to tell us what is important and what we should pay attention to. However, when was the last time you used one of Big Media's search engines to find information? When I need to find information, no matter how trivial, I turn to Google first. Google succeeds precisely because it isn't Big Media; it relies on the opinions (and links) of all. This isn't to say that Big Media is dead. I still check a number of major news and commentary sites on a daily basis, but I am increasingly relying on blogs (via a personalized RSS aggregators) for a substantial amount of the information gathering that Big Media used to be the sole source of. These are just a few quick thoughts. More on this topic later.
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Average Score: 4.18 Votes: 22

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"User's Login" | Login/Create an Account | 3 comments |
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Re: Google and Big Media's New Clothes (Score: 2, Informative) by anthony_dipierro on Thursday, June 06 @ 11:09:44 EDT (User Info | Send a Message) http://slashdotsucks.com/ | Information is great, and the bazaar strategy is the way to go for publishing it. And I think the poster hit the nail on the head that copyright concentration is the main thing holding the small players back.
Perhaps this is part of the "More on this topic later", but search engines are not the only way to aggregate data. What we need is an easily applicable copyright license to allow aggregators to tie the content together.
If you notice at the bottom of this comment, lawmeme releases its content under the OPL. What this means is that any webmaster, such as myself, can take the content and post it on his/her own site, like here. A powerful solution which has brought massive innovation to the software market, the copyleft could make drastic changes to the state of information on the internet.
Currently there are two major problems with copylefted open content. First, and probably most importantly, small bits of content generally are not thought of as very important by the contributor. While many contributors to a blog may not care about reuse of their content, this is not clear to others, and it certainly is not clear to automated spiders crawling the web. Work is being done on making it easier to mark one's content as open content of a certain type, and making that marking machine-readable.
The other problem is that there is currently no real infrastructure in place to distribute freely available content. There are some repositories for specific types of content, most notable SourceForge in the software realm, and Wikipedia in the encyclopedia content realm, but the myriad of different licenses and formats make aggregation of pure unencumbered content difficult. Even the licenses themselves sometimes make this difficult. There is a long discussion going on at the Wikipedia site as to what exactly the GFDL means when applied to the site's content.
That perhaps leads to a third problem, which is really part of the second - the number of licenses, all incompatible. Even moreso than software, different pieces of content from various different sources can generally be molded together to create a meaningful derivitive work. The multitude of licenses discourages this, and that is especially unfortunate because in many cases the authors of the content are both trying to accomplish the same thing. There is a need for a standard license which many people can agree on. The GFDL could have been that license, but it is woefully inadequete for all but a very specific type of content.
Not to be left out of the loop, I of course have developed my own open content copyleft, which I named the QingPL. I'm not going to get into detail of the license here, I'll just state that this post is released freely under the QingPL (as well as the OPL, which I assume is required of all posts on this site). |
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