Lisa Rein has posted a Daily Show excerpt about the RIAA settlement with a 12-year-old girl "pirate" in which David Bowie shares his opinion that "it's crazy, just crazy out there. Most industries out there are in decline at the moment." As Jon Stewart points out, Bowie seems to be doing a coffee commercial as he says this.
Years ago, at Digital World, the poet and NPR commentator Andre Codrescu was on a panel I moderated and said "Someday, people will just pay me to be me." Bowie figured that out years ago, but Codrescu was right in a larger sense (and, note, they both have Web sites today). As we change from an information-based to an information-dependent society, the people we rely on for filtering and insight into events will become more and more like the local priest, who was basically paid to read and translate Latin phrases into homilies that dealt with the death of a child or the recent outbreak of smallpox. And, you know, it's crazy, just crazy out there.
Now, in that context, is Jason Calcanis' new Weblogs Inc. the answer for business people who want to know what it all means? The mission statement on the site repeats what we know or, at least, tend to believe if we spend time blogging, that journalism is broken and that talent wants to be free and partnering is better than owning. This last idea, that partnering is better than owning, is actually an non-twist that means very little as partnership is shared ownership; the real question is how to provide a foundation for new thinking that is extensibly ownable, so that new participants can take shares of revenue for their added contributions to previous thoughts. The whole idea of the Creative Commons is that we can share ideas and, if we choose, through a Share and Share Alike non-commercial use license collect for any commercial re-use of original ideas while leaving them in the public domain for non-commerical use by others.
The end of the Weblogs Inc. pitch to would-be blogger-partners is this:
We also allow bloggers to leave our network at any time, for any reason, and take their content with them. The concept behind our agreement is that if you partner with us on a Weblog and leave a year later you can take all your content with you and do whatever you want with it. Our only condition is that we keep our copy of the content that is already in our archive. We think this is the fairest arrangement possible and that it promotes the kind of partnership we want to have with our bloggers.
Granted, that sounds fair, but what if the partnership hasn't worked? Is the injured party, should some financial or ethical transgression have occurred, obliged to leave their work in the partnership? There is something to be said for ownership (really, we're talking about control over our reputation) that allows us to refuse to be associated with another party if we've decided that the business relationship hasn't worked. If I feel the value of my contribution hasn't been honored and leave the partnership, why should what I was not compensated for continue to be the property of another? Typically, partners separating agree on how to split the assets of the partnership. For the small business or the freelance journalist, the continuing control over the product of their labor is one of the few bits of leverage they have and it should not be forfeited lightly.
I'm glad to see Weblogs Inc. says it "sincerely hope[s] to help this field mature," but it isn't clear how that will happen because they host a collection of blogs. Marketing is important, and Jason Calcanis has marketed successfully in the past. What can't be predicted is whether posting calls for bloggers, industry professional contributors and sponsors is going to provide the catalyst for a new type of trade publication, which is what the Weblogs Inc. mission statement seems to be getting at. It is certainly a nervy way to start, admitting upfront that without partners the company has nothing.
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at September 24, 2003 10:52 AM | TrackBackOn Weblogs, Inc. "our copy" to me is the sticky point. The specifics of their bloggers agreement, and services need to be revealed before Weblogs can establish clear license to retain content for downstream sales. Understandably, pro-bloggers need marketing partners, and hosting and tools services. I agree Jason's group should be able to profit from their aggregation activities but in my opinion clear title to downstream revenue just because a content provider once used your production or hosting facilities is unfair to content creators.
The line here is what revenue privileges service companies can take with, or without the content creators direct permission. A variety of factors are making it more difficult, or restrictive for content owners to directly negotiate hosting scenarios. One solution we are investigating is how to integrate host processing rules into syndication file formats such that content can float between host environments while revenue rules established by content creators are fetched in real-time by aggregators. Using a web services arrangement, content creators can continually tweak their revenue goals for select content, and aggregation points can react accordingly without having to re-negotiate with every publisher.
I failed to note any Weblog commitment to undertaking marketing/sales or online organization activity.
To read their statement as now put forward the content creator is agreeing to share a year of underdetermined revenue for simply hosting the content.
Great if you don't wan't to host. Otherwise it seems questionable.
...harry
Posted by: harry goodman at September 28, 2003 05:18 PMHarry,
I think they intend to market, but the quandary is whether they will market before they find a solid contributor, who will be waiting to see if WeblogsInc.com will market them. There are a lot of reasons for this to fail, since no one is incented at the beginning to give more to the partnership than they would to their own blog. WeblogsInc.com needs to pay someone in order to feel the urgency of marketing.
Mitch
Posted by: Mitch Ratcliffe at September 28, 2003 05:42 PM