jackthurston.com

From today, all the content at the New York Times website will be free - ending a practice that saw some of America’s best reporting and column writing hidden behind a 'pay wall'. Why a website with a Google Page Rank of 8/10 and therefore huge potential for paid adverts should ever have considered charging for content was always beyond me. Now they appear to have seen sense and have gone the whole hog by opening up their full digital archives back to 1987.

How long before the FT and The Economist follow suit? Amazingly there are still some think tanks out there that are charging for their policy reports - such as the Centre for European Reform, which has some of the best thinkers around, but when it comes to the web is rooted firmly in the dark ages as this £5 for a PDF download demonstrates. I’m sure it’s a great read.  

Read more at nytimes.com

Last night I attended an interesting talk at the Frontline Club where Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, argued that blogs, social networking and user generated digital content pose a threat to our culture, economy and civilisation. Very quickly it became clear that Keen relishes his role as contrarian and provocateur and that his tongue was very often in his cheek. Even so, he did express with passion his concerns about Web 2.0 as a toxic mash-up of, as he put it, ‘the countercultural Sixties, the free market idealism of the Eighties, and the technological determinism and consumer-centricity of the Nineties’. (more…)