DISQUS

Your title is the best summary of the Yahoogle deal on the web. Good call!

Yes, but...do we know how many of those are (so to speak) ex-pats? I regularly look up online news about Otley - the town in Yorkshire where I grew up - but I'd be of almost no interest to advertisers offering a local service there because I visit maybe four times a year and rarely buy anything except a couple of pints of Tetley's as I pass through. My father also follows a local newspaper website from a remote village in Ireland that he's never visited on grounds that "it's funny to read news from a place where bugger-all ever happens". I suppose we'll know for sure that not everyone reading the TS10 site actually lives in TS10 when the site users outnumber the inhabitants.

But what you're asking for is for people to voluntarily bear the cost (miss out on talking to a friend) of generating a positive externality (be reminded of their ties to humanity in general). People don't usually behave that way do they?

If Virgin is really going to war with file sharers I can't make any business sense of the move at all.

Virgin can't compete with Sky for content. It already tried and, famously, Lost. What remains on Virgin's VOD service is a shadow of the packages Sky offers.

What it *can* compete on is unmoderated bandwidth. Sky (and BT, who run their own VOD service in the form of Vision) have plausible business reasons for kicking file sharers off their networks - they'll do it so they can sell them the content instead. So if Virgin can just give up trying to sell their weak content package they can compete by selling unmoderated bandwidth to file sharers.

I don't see "freeing up bandwidth" as a plausible motive. Bandwidth utilisation follows the standard power laws. If they want to kick the very heaviest users off to free up bandwidth the standard trick is a "fair use" clause. They don't need to threaten most of their users to achieve that. But if they ban everyone from even moderate file-sharing the demand for anything but the smallest pipe seems likely to dry up - who's going to pay for a 10meg pipe just to check email?

So it must be fear of a court case or a change in the laws. That sucks - that a business decision to sell your customers the thing they want is made impossible by a barely-plausible legislative / litigious threat. Yet alas that seems to be where we are.

I think the important distinction here is not between experts and the non-experts but between people acting in circumstances where they have the incentive to behave in an informed and rational manner and people acting in circumstances where they do not. The argument is simply that if you do something that doesn't matter to you, you won't do it especially well. Voting for a national government is a classic example. The chance of my vote mattering is sufficiently close to zero to make no odds, so there's no incentive for me to vote even vaguely sensibly.

Or to take an example from social media - anonymous or pseudonymous message boards generate a terrible noise/signal ratio compared to discussions that require verifiable identities on the part of participants. One (economic) explanation for this is that posting anonymous nonsense to a board has no reputational cost. Posting under your own name does. I'd be reluctant to deliberately troll here (or anywhere) under my own name: but under a momentarily-adopted nom de plume, there's nothing to lose.

In this sense your experiment should confirm Bryan's hypothesis. If you get sensible comments from people writing under their own names or linking back to real, relevant blogs it's because there's a reputational gain for them and/or they're keen to gain the collective benefits of sharing knowledge through debate. If you get nonsense from trolls I'd lay money on that nonsense being attached to made-up names and with no return path.

"Did she ever read anything about witchcraft or wizardry that got her mind working on what became Harry Potter?"

The first Harry Potter story is widely thought to owe at least a passing debt to a book written in 1984 by Nancy Stouffer called 'The Legend of Rah and the Muggles' which includes, amongst other things, a character called Larry Potter and extensive use of magic. In the event the courts threw out Ms Stouffer's claim for plagiarism, not least because she seemed to have fabricated some of her case, but the similarities between some of the details of both stories are reasonably striking.

Nick's examples may tend to the elitist, but I think he makes a reasonable point. Some things are better for being shared. However, some things are quite legitimately spoiled by being overexposed.

Look at Lonely Planet, and its semi-secret policy of never writing up the best places the writers find in case a mass influx of backpackers destroys them. There are bars I go to that are lovely precisely because they're relatively empty: I don't especially want to deny their benefits to anyone else, but at the same time I recognise that if everyone visited those bars then what I like about them would cease to exist.

Sure, in one sense it's elitist for surfers to try and keep other people away from their beaches but there really does come a point at which there's so many people in the water it's essentially impossible to surf (just as there long ago came a point when it was essentially impossible to drive through any of our cities).

You might then enjoy this from Michael Bywater's excellent book "Big Babies":

"The old saw 'the innocent have nothing to hide' fails to persuade us because it is a category mistake. Having something to hide is not contingent on guilt but on autonomy."

Enjoyed your debate at the Telegraph on Wednesday BTW, v interesting.

Excellent news. When I added it to my blogroll it came up under the title "Press Gazette ? Fleet Street 2.0" though, I think you've got an error in the Wordpress title field.

Whoops, messed up the HTML tags in that comment and can't see any way of editing it - perhaps you could fix it Martin?

A UK media version of the Corante network which relevant bloggers could cross-post their best/most pertinent articles to, perhaps? Sounds like a sensible move - it puts everything in one place, and introduces an element of peer-review validation to what is otherwise a bunch of people saying whatever we like. The perfect model for me in that regard is the US stockmarket site SeekingAlpha which lets anyone submit an article, but then has it go through an editorial review process before it gets onto the site.

Thanks. I've got a summary of what happens when you turn the choice of content over to readers at http://qurl.com/wsk51 and there's another at the American Journalism Review here http://qurl.com/hdlp8. Nick Carr occasionally touches on this issue too with particular reference to Wikipedia, see e.g. http://qurl.com/nppmw. Generally, the conclusion I tend to is that the lowest common denominator is awfully low...

One newspaper - Chile's Las Ultimas Noticias - has tried this for a number of years now. It runs stories on its website and the ones that prove most popular online are prioritised in the next day's print edition.

What, possibly, is missing from this model is that in embracing a web2.0 approach the tone of the newspaper has deteriorated massively, from a relatively serious news publication to a celebrity tabloid. Now, one might argue that if that's what people want that's what they should get. Fair enough, but it's not necessarily what the advertisers want. One of the distinctive benefits of a newspaper is that it can offer advertisers serious content against which to promote their brands, quite distinctively from e.g. MySpace etc. This is one of the reasons, I would argue, newspapers continue to enjoy a share of the ad market disproportionate to their reach and it would not be a trivial decision to give that USP up so as to encourage a more user-edited approach.