The Cult of the Amateur: “What you may not realize is that what is free is actually costing us a fortune,” Mr. Keen writes. “The new winners — Google, YouTube, MySpace, Craigslist, and the hundreds of start-ups hungry for a piece of the Web 2.0 pie — are unlikely to fill the shoes of the industries they are helping to undermine, in terms of products produced, jobs created, revenue generated or benefits conferred. By stealing away our eyeballs, the blogs and wikis are decimating the publishing, music and news-gathering industries that created the original content those Web sites ‘aggregate.’ Our culture is essentially cannibalizing its young, destroying the very sources of the content they crave.”
Uma boa ideia: Jim Roberts, [NYT] editor of digital news, is answering reader questions June 25 through 29, 2007: Newspapers are clearly undergoing more financial stress now than they have ever faced as readers and advertisers move to the Web. But the picture isn’t as bleak as it sounds. The New York Times actually has many more readers now — possibly hundreds of thousands more — because of nytimes.com, and I’m sure other publications recognize this, too.
Because of the huge amount — and often unruly nature — of information that is now available to people on the Web and elsewhere, I think there is an ever-greater need for well-reported, well-edited thoughtful journalism. I sense that readers crave it in whatever form we can provide it to them: print, broadcast or online.
Project Red Stripe - And the idea is…: We are developing a web service that harnesses the collective intelligence of The Economist Group’s community, enabling them to contribute their skills and knowledge to international and local development organisations. These business minds will help find solutions to the world’s most important development problems.
It will be a global platform that helps to offset the brain drain, by making expertise flow back into the developing world. We’ve codenamed the service “Lughenjo”, an Tuvetan word meaning gift.
