Margo Kingston

Margo Kingston goes it alone after falling out with Fairfax press. She has become disillusioned with big media and wants to restore respect to journalists. She is running an experiment to get a truly free press running on the net. I know it already exists, but she wants to do it in a way that produces an income for journalists.
http://margokingston.typepad.com/

She was interviewed on the Media Report on Radio National this morning.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/mediarpt/default.htm
(Transcript and downloadable audio will be up there tomorrow.)

On rethinking, she seems a little elitist. Granted that some people are better journalists than others, but it may be that the shift required is that the 'source' for news might not be able to be restricted to a few very able people anymore. Journalists, as a group, have betrayed the public. Regaining trust might be more difficult than divorcing from their previous owners.

I wonder what will be the fallout for the creative professions.
The net is wonderful and allows us to distribute our wares for free, but this undoes the major model for making an income. Up till now value and payment resulted from scarcity. If something was scarce it became valuable. If something was freely available everywhere then it was worth nothing. Intrinsic value is almost devoid of meaning in a monetary economy. How do you get money in a system that relies on scarcity if you are eliminating scarcity?

LiveJournal is one of the examples of how this can be done. LJ is free, yet many people choose to pay. (I do when I have surplus funds.) The open source movement has produced a lot of examples of free wares that generate money. It can be done. It is not easy to see how it can extend to all the creative professions though.

two books by Cory Doctorow online

Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town
http://craphound.com/someone/download.php
and
Eastern Standard Tribe
http://craphound.com/est/download.php

This is neat. A lot of people seem to be doing this now. You can download for free and/or you can buy it. If you think he won't make money that way then think again. LiveJournal uses exactly the same business model. Welcome to the new, poor-friendly world where abundance is not a threat and value is intrinsic rather than artificially conferred by scarcity.

On this topic also, I've previously mentioned that you can download (and/or buy) Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture
http://free-culture.org/freecontent/
It tells how all the big media organisations started out as pirates and how copyright has been turned upside down so that its use is now the reverse of its original intent.

last one about religion for a while, I promise

It would be nice if the different religions would stop jostling each other for power over people's minds and just let us atheists alone. We don't try to force our beliefs down religious throats, I don't see why they have to hassle us so much. I don't know how many times I've been brought to my door early on Sunday morning by religious people wanting to convert me.

What is really weird is when I'm at social gatherings and the religious ones start to go on about god this and pray about that. If I stand up for my position and point out the mistakes in their logic they become insulted. It is like the old days when people polluted your air with cigarette smoke they'd get annoyed if you objected. Likewise religious people feel they can pollute the mind-space with impunity, and become annoyed if asked not to. They somehow think it infringes upon their rights.

I'd like laws that prevent people from spouting religion in public places and law suits against those who would damage the impressionable minds of youth by contaminating them with toxic religious memes. It might finally force moslem, christian, and other religious zealots to put a sock in it.

No more from me about religion for a while. I find I get too depressed by it.