Pardon the brief, self-promotional nature of this post, but I just realized if I don’t get one up soon I’m going to miss the deadline – voting for SXSW Interactive 2010 ends this Friday!
Photo by ehnmark, cc-by license
I’ve submitted two panel proposals this year – each is described below with a voting link.
Given all the raging debate about paid media online – whether users (or consumers, if you prefer) will pay for access to content, whether paywalls and micropayments have a place, and the like – it’s refreshing to see an independent podcaster demonstrating the value of well curated content and the willingness of folks to pay for it.
Coverville's Original Logo
Coverville is a podcast hosted by Brian Ibbott and recorded in his home near Denver, which features cover songs and the topic of covers generally. He does a fantastic job, hosting theme shows like originalville (in which he plays the original versions of songs people mostly know by a famous cover) and cover story (in which the whole episode is devoted to covers of and by a specific artist). Check out the Wikipedia entry on Coverville for a sense of how popular the show’s become.
It’s beginning to look like the summer of 2009 (or Fall of 2009, depending on how slowly these projects move forward) may be the season in which paid content on major news publishers returns to favor.
Returns to favor among publishers, that is. Will readers accept new paywalls, or simply go elsewhere? Will micropayments finally become a cost-effective option users adopt, or just a costly distraction? What about freemium models, in which base content remains free but other rewards are used to entice what amount to donations?
Read more…
The spring of 2009 has been a difficult one for publishers – newspapers especially – in the U.S., with many sizable metropolitan papers moving to online only, closing, or facing the possibility of closing. It’s lead many to wonder (again) what the future holds for publishers – whose value has arguably been derived from information scarcity – in the age of information ubiquity.
What should newspaper publishers, and other content-centered businesses, do? How should publishing evolve to accommodate the tremendous shift in publishing power represented by the fact that every internet user has a technical capability to create and distribute content never before seen? How should they adapt to the assembled web, in which users expect to interact with content in contexts they choose, rather than in contexts publishers control?
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