Thursday, September 29, 2005

Charging for damages

Micah Sifry: Free Thomas Friedman. The money graf:

The Times has made a big mistake in taking their most popular content out of the conversation, and the network is routing around the error. People are turning to bloggers, figuring they'll find the gist or the text of their favorite columnists in the blogosphere, and their prayers are being answered. Bloggers are posting the full text of Times columns; I wonder what kind of traffic jumps they're experiencing. And I wonder if the New York Times is now planning to unleash its lawyers on them.

Brings to mind what John Gilmore (was said to have) said:

The Net treats censorship as damage and routes around it.

Just as important is what he added:

Internet users have proven it time after time, by publicly replicating information that is threatened with destruction or censorship. If you now consider the Net to be not only the wires and machines, but the people and their social structures who use the machines, it is more true than ever.

The Net is also a marketplace. Clearly the best way to make money there isn't by taking what was always open and free, putting up a wall around it and charging for admission. Do that with the dead stuff that fills museums. Not the live stuff.

Nothing wrong with charging money for the live stuff, of course. Just do that while it's new and most valuable in the marketplace, like you've done with print for the duration. Then free it up after 24 hours. More about that biz model here.

The Fire This Time

Heading south from Pismo Beach, I began to notice an unusually high layer of clouds in the far distance, to the Southeast, mostly likely off the coast of Santa Barbara, where I live. In other seasons this would be normal. But in September, our hot month, the more likely cause would be fire. There must be one somewhere, I thought. So I tuned in KNX/1070, the largest Los Angeles news station. Sure enough, there was a fire big enough to name: Chatsworth.

The chatsworth Flickr tag collection already has many photos. My modest one is here. Much better ones are from clownfish, justinm (here's his set of shots), dkhan, skell (my view is from the opposite side of that last link), weezgrrl and jonsphotos.

Fire is Serious Stuff here. The 1977 Sycamore Canyon fire burned to within a few houses of where I am right now (not far from the right edge of the picture in that last link) The house where we lived in Montecito was within several houses of both the Sycamore Canyon fire and the 1964 Coyote fire.

So yes, it's creepy.

Follow blog (and other) reports here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Here's an LA Times story, with lots of links and pictures around it.

Roadride

I'm paused at a Starbucks in San Luis Obispo on my way home after three days of meetings in the Bay Area. Shot the pic above about an hour north of here, in the Salinas Valley, when I wasn't drumming on the dashboard in time with The Roadhouse Podcast. Been listening backwards, starting with #32. Perfect music for the open road.

Got about 1.5 hours to go. See ya home.

Meanwhile, glad Cameron caught this moment yesterday.