> I'm not sure there is much evidence supporting this for things outside of
> the Internet:
>
> Most libraries are free, but their use is declining while book sales continue
> to increase.
> The cost of cards and postage keeps going up, but I still get a wall full
> of Christmas cards every December. (And send a like number.)
Which is a great example of how this stuff gets misinterpreted. it's
not cost. it's cost vs. perceived value. Users don't see as much
utility in a library (however, go into one of the large Barnes &
Noble's and see how many folks are there using it as a library. And B&N
encourages it...), but they do in cards.
Libraries are a bad example, because of all sorts of factors. some of
those include that while libraries are free, budget issues in the
overseeing organizations (mostly cities) has meant that purchases are
reduced, hours are reduced, convenience is reduced, etc, etc. And
outside factors, from the internet to B&N, have replaced the library as
a basic research point and/or social location. The declining use of
libraries has many, many differing reasons behind it, none of which
have to do with cost....
Cost is a useless rating tool. VALUE is, because if a person feels the
cost is worth it, they'll pay it. And if not, it doesn't matter if it's
free. Just ask all those people who thought they'd make money with
subscription-based web sites.... Other than the Wall Street Journal,
how many have?
> Pay-per-view services are the fastest growing segment of the cable TV
> business, and likely to become even more so, as I suspect/fear that
> many sporting events will start to move in that direction, some already have.
But only within specific market niches. Every attempt to move out of
those niches has failed miserably, and continue to. Big Event things
(boxing, for instance), and movies, and the latter works mostly in
terms of convenience compared to hitting up Blockbuster.
> Even though I now live in Nebraska, I'm still a die-hard Cubs fan.
>Would I pay
> a few dollars to see Kerry Wood pitch against the Brewers tonight?
>(The game
> isn't on WGN TV, but is on something called CLTV, which isn't available
> here.) Probably.
Chicagoland TV. Basically, local cable access, which is a way to spoof
baseball restrictions. If you have C band, look around, they'll have a
feed unencrypted.
> The existence of Internet chess servers has not yet killed off postal
> chess, though I suspect it may have cut back on the number of non-serious
> chessplayers participating.
And more importantly, how many people have JOINED postal chess in the
last 3 years? You won't generally kill these things off. You will,
however, watch the old population turn grey and die off, because what
happens is you mostly do NOT suck people out of their existing setups,
you watch the new generation of those people not join up -- they do
something else, or some other aspect of it.
> As to things like newsgroup moderators, yes there should be some way
> of handling them equitably.
Hold this thought...
> But as far as newsgroups are concerned, I think Chuq is right about their
> being a dinosaur, it's a question of when and how they become extinct,
> and what evolves to fill that need.
Yes, but fi you look below, there's even a way to make USENET useful again....
> Right now there are ISP's and others devoting considerable expense to
>'helping
> the net'.
> Would these folks still be willing to
> pay the charges for posting FAQ's and hosting moderators if this service was
> transactionally priced, or more accurately priced on a much smaller
>incremental
> unit? Chuq, would Apple?
Heck, most of the time, the company simply didn't know it was paying
for it. It was usually a few people in a key place and a budget they
hid somewhere -- most of the development of this stuff didn't come from
a COMPANY, but from people within a company who believed, and either
did it on the side, convinced a manager to support it, or simply hid it
from everyone -- and you can tell just how common that was by the
number of sites who either shrunk radically or disappeared when the key
person moved on... (anyone remember when nsc.com was a pretty major
regional USENET hub?)
Could I convince Apple to pay for something like this? Probably not.
Would I try? probably not. Most likely, the people involved would
simply do it, and it'd get lost in the midst of the overall networking
budget. Unless you have anal managers watching the bitflow, chances are
nobody'd ever notice. And if you do, the folks most likely to pull this
kind of service is unlikely to be at that company long, anyway. That
kind of, ahem, fascist net environment tends to hurt morale, and folks
who feel the net is important and are competent enough to get better
jobs will. But the, ahem, IS weenies who block ESPN.com from corporate
intranets and ban solitaire from the windows 95 disks don't care... But
I'm about to digress, and I'll spare you. (short answer to this: if the
costs are reasonable, corporate approval is irrelevant, just as
corporate approval to subscribe to this mailing list is in most places.
And places that DO keep you from subscriging to lists like this, you
don't wanna work at, anyway... right?)
Back to the thought you're holding. Mike's idea won't fly (IMHO),
because the genie is out of the bottle, and no matter how much you
might want to overlay a kind of pay-for for this stuff, it won't
replace what already exists, any more than AOL switching from unlimited
time to metered time won't happen voluntarily -- AOL has to REPLACE it,
and since they own the service, they can. Users won't voluntarily give
up something they see as free, problems and all, for something they pay
for. And there's no central authority to force them to take on the new
system.
No sticks? Invent carrots. And here, we have no sticks. And that means
you need to think in terms of technology that individuals can implement
for themselves, not technologies that have to be emplaced upon others
for them to work. that's why filtering issues are such a key, and why
spamblocking is doing it that way. I can't stop spam -- I can decide
not ot take it on my site.
But back to the moderator concept, and tying it into perceived value
and all that. One idea that got floated centuries ago (okay, back in
the 80's). I believe I was the first to mention it, and it ended up
being discussed in an issue of "Login;" by Erik Fair. It was the
concept of the Accolade, which at that point was aimed at USENET -- the
idea being that users who saw USENET articles they liked could send an
"accolade" message, yet another new control message. And other users
who wanted to base their newsreading habit on users they trusted could
set up their newsreaders to show "accoladed" messages from the
appropriate users (or avoid de-accoladed messages...)
Accolades *are*, in fact, in use today in various ways. They're not new
to the net, either (what is a book review or restaurant review but an
accolade in a newspaper?) -- the RBL is an accolade system, where an
admin has agreed to let a remote organization define "acceptable"
e-mail systems. Any time you use someone's hotlinks page on a web site,
that's another form of accolade. Web sites that track information and
condense or keep pointers to things are accolade sites (technically
speaking, so is an issue of "time" magazine, since you're basing your
reading on the choices the editor makes. Editors are, effectively,
accoladers. And that's a great paradigm to use here. And also a great
example of just how loose and fast I'm playing with terminology...
Kids, this man is a professional. don't try this at home. Closed track.
Wear your seatbelts)
so, how do you handle moderators equitably? you hired them to filter
things for you. use the shareware concept, or micropayments, or
whatever. let people set themselves up as arbiters of content, and you
evaluate them, and if you find them worthy, you leverage your use off
of the time they spend pre-processing content... And if you find it
worthy, pay them, either donate-ware or subscription.
Good web sites of the kind I'm thinking ar eplaces like
http://www.macintouch.com/ or http://www.tbtf.com/, an there are even
meta-consolidators, like http://www.macnn.com/, which consolidate sites
that consolidate information ( http://www.macsurfer.com/ is the epitomy
of meta-consolidators in the mac space...)
There are always people willing to blaze trails, whether into new
technologies, or by doing the research for you. Find people who think
like you and build information sets you find useful, and then find ways
to make it worth their while to continue. That is a much more effective
soluion than attempting to revolutionize "the net" when the changes
will require a big, big stick and you only have a penknife to start
carving with. But if you carve up a few carrots...
--
Chuq Von Rospach (Hockey fan? <http://www.plaidworks.com/hockey/>)
Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
<http://www.plaidworks.com/> + <http://www.lists.apple.com/>
