Comment Articles

Writer's Blog

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 10 Oct 2002 16:30 BST

Tim Berners-Lee has long been less than happy. The inventor of the Web isn't ashamed of what he wrought, but it's not really what he wanted. What he envisioned was a collaborative medium, not a device for hoovering clean the shelves of record shops, pornographers and software companies. But with the advent of the blog, it looks as if he's got his wish at last. The whole world in conversation with itself: the fundamental atomic particles of news -- things happening to people -- released from the machinery of the media.

There are endless debates about what blogs are. Journalism? Ego boosting? A window into society? The outpourings of atypical, dysfunctional nerds? All of the above? But that's missing the point. Blogs are there, and blogs are free. As are press releases, advertising and propaganda. As is anything anywhere that anyone wants to say.

Ah yes, Free. Nobody who's been awake online for more than five minutes can have missed Stewart Brand's famous aphorism, "information wants to be free". What he said next is just as important, for all it gets forgotten: "Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine -- too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new (technological) devices makes the tension worse, not better"

For journalists and publishers, this tension has been palpable for years. It's now unbearable. Not only does information want to be free, there's so much of it out there that by the laws of the market it can't be anything else. Media companies have stopped talking about 'educating' readers to pay for online content that used to cost real money on real pages: they've even realised that microbilling, where you pay a fraction of a penny many times over as you read a site, is never going to fly. The raw material of publishing used to lie deep underground. Now it's scattered all over the surface. Who'd be a miner?

There is one model where value is generated from vast amounts of freely available online stuff, and that's Linux. It's a real industry, with people competing with each other and sometimes making money, sometimes going bust. There's not one thing on a Red Hat CD that you couldn't get for nothing except your own time and trouble -- but you're worth more than that. Yes, you can run large chunks of your business on software that's not only costless but entirely without secrets, so you can learn all about how it works and maintain it yourself. Or you could pay an expert a few thousand dollars and have all that sorted out. Not mining, but smelting.