Peter's Griddle

The traditional view of media as being predominantly serviced by commercial content providers is rapidly being destroyed, if it was ever true in the first place. At a seminar yesterday, organised by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs (a.o.) in preparation of new digital policies, some strong opinions were being voiced. According to some: "98% of the content that is available online is already free". We are talking free as in provided by volunteers, not pirated.

In the industry this is called 'user provided content', which expresses a one-sided view only to be compared to calling airline passengers 'self loading cargo'.

Great examples of this are to be found in free software, reference material (Wikipedia: 1 million articles and counting), and just about anything else (http://creativecommons.org/). Now it is totally obvious that not all of this is very interesting or of high quality, but that is where new content filters and agregators such as bloggers come in. Maybe this is what McLuhan referred to as: "the medium is the message", and we should rephrase that as "the network is the content".

However, one paradox remains: distribution of this free content obviously creates prosperity and affluence. Yet, in the economic statistics we can only see media companies having a hard time, and the benefits do not show up.

Some additional references are 3 billion channels, and there is a market.

# posted by pve @ 9:57 AM    Save this to Del.icio.us