>Or the costs of developing the information in the first place. I'm
>constantly getting emails from people complaining that LBO is too expensive,
eh? and i thought _i_ was a tightwad?
> that I should give it away on the web, that I should put up Acrobat
> versions of Wall Street and A New Economy? (when it's done, which won't
> be long, I swear!), etc.
i think people have the mistaken view that your politics should somehow make you anti-property and anti-copyright. yadda. nice sentiments for going broke! :)
>Like I'm not trying to pay the rent by writing, like it costs nothing for
>Internet access, subscriptions, phone calls, travel, and like it takes no
>time to maintain a website. The net has bred a righteous sense of
>entitlement among users, because it seems to be costless - there's no
>commodity you can drop on your foot, so it must be free, right?
i don't think that it's the physicalness of the commodity that's at issue. rather,it's the way the Web was developed--on the model of commercial television. on this model, it does feel free. but, since people don't pay for channels (altho i see that's coming; see M$'s latest, as well as Salon's $30/month price tag for viewing paid for content), they don't even make some kind of connection between how much they pay and how much they have "free access" (underwritten by adverts) to and how much they pay (basic, premium, etc). people do this now, with television: they make a connection between what they pay and what they get access to, but they rarely understand how advertisements are underwriting most of the costs. just as we don't 'get' how newspapers and magazines are mainly underwritten by advertisers. "we" ostensibly like this because it appears we have a choice. that is, we can "free ride" and not read/view the ads and not purchase the products/services.
now, advertising on the 'net is especially ineffective, as the not-conomy is discovering. only 2-4% of all sales are generated by people clicking on a banner ad link. there's a higher rate of return on newsletter promotions, however: people _will_ click on a link in a newsletter more often than they will click on a banner ad. i get i don't know how many newsletters for work-related matters--probably 100 between daily, weekly and monthly mailings. a number of them have mentioned that they will go the pay-for-subscription route b/c advertising dollars have evaporated in the past three months.
the other thing that's interesting is that people are willing to trade privacy--information about themselves that can be sold to marketers--for access to information (gak: content) that they want.[1] this is the direction the Web will take and that's where the money will come from. from there, of course, we have target marketing techniques that work incredibly nicely in the flexible economy. as Turow points out in _Breaking Up America_, advertisers and others have been using this in traditional media to tailor media content to the zip code. certain zips, for ex, get certain covers on a magazine and certain zips get magazines filled with adverts from high end retailers, etc., whereas other zips get adverts from low end retailers.
imagine the tailoring potential of the net! on another list i sub to there is a low tolerance for 'lusers' (are you a luser? do you use AOhell? do you fail to use >'s to mark off replied to text? do you reply to others at the top of their message? do you send HTML mail? do you forward entire articles when a link will do? are you a dingleberry dropper? yes, most of LBO's subscribers are 'lusers' on their view! :) ). one day, someone suggested that all 'lusers' should be consigned to a 'mirror' of the web -- so they'd be safe, for their own protection, so they could have their hand held. but, most importantly, a separate 'reservation' for lusers was so they'd be removed from the world of the 'l33t Internet user!
now, of course, this sounds silly, but it's not so weird when you consider that AOL has pretty much designed a world just like that. well, AOL wishes they could _make_ it just like that. AOLers never have to leave the reservation! as someone pointed out on Nanog during the Microsoft outtage, some of what might have contributed to M$'s woes was a inadvertant Denial of Service attack. Since IE default to MSN's home page, when it didn't come up for people when they logged on in the morning, they'd keeping hitting refresh trying to bring it up. it never occurred to them to try another site (as some sys admins complained). they thought that "the internet was broke!"
now, this is the wetdream --endless orgasms, 'k joe?--of the Web entrepreneur. somewhere i was reading about mapping the Internet so you could know where a user was logging in from far more specifically than they can now. this is information people want in order to track cybercriminals, fraudsters, kiddie porn pimps, etc. and there was some talk about how our privacy will be invaded by the gov't. yadda. more practically, it's a technology that will be exploited by marketers/advertisers/retailers/etc.: correlate your IP addy with something akin to the zip codes used by marketers now. THEN, tailor the content the user sees to what marketers think appeal to them, what's in their price range. it's quite possible that "content" will be tailored as well, no? even news content. (this is the scenario hinted at by J. Turow in _Breaking Up America_ -- altho, certainly not in paranoiac terms!)
not hard to do and it's already being done. when i did that piece on Netspionage a few months ago, i wrote about how sites will put up different versions depending on the IP address. if it's from a competitor, they get one version. if it's from an IP address that might be a potential client, they get another version. Doubleclick did this a couple of years ago, redirecting a competitor to a site that touted the fact that it had snagged some clients from the competitor, iirc.
hmmm. anyway,
kelley
[1] as a recent poll pointed out, people are willing to cash in their marketing data for goods, but they also want more gov't regulation of cybercrime. (to be expected, of course, blacks in the survey said NO to more gov't reg.)
>Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch,
>
>Doug