I've had this sitting in my draft pile for a long time: a link to an entry in Good Morning Silicon Valley: You kids just go ahead and entertain yourselves. It talks about the shift in how people use the web - from collecting information and just taking what's available, to providing information and supplying "content", and interacting with online communities. It's certainly true for me. I've been a nethead for over ten years now, evidenced by my Yahoo! profile, and while I still use the internet as a vast library and information resource, the sites that I keep coming back to, are those that offer me a community in which I participate: my blog neighborhood, where I write and read, and flickr, where I post and look at photos.
Newspapers, record labels, movie studios and television channels are finally noticing that Consumers are no longer restricted to consuming, but I think they still get it wrong because of the green-colored glasses they are wearing.
Well and good, says Nick Carr, but he raises two concerns about what he calls "the global karaoke machine": Is there any money to be made serving as a user-to-user clearinghouse? And how close is this to a zero-sum game?
It's not about the money, silly! Ya'll had the clue earlier in the column: self-expression. I write in my blog and post my photos to express myself, to show pieces of myself to other loosely joined pieces, and to share them with friends, family, and strangers. Money? Not on my radar in this context, and I am pretty darn sure that's also true for most other bloggers I know.
Not that there's anything wrong with blogging for money. But that's a different thing, and I don't get why everybody lumps it in the same category (I kinda do, actually, I'm just polemizing).
To me, who's in the thick of it, it's like comparing speaking with your neighbor across the fence (social interaction) to Tony Robbins holding a seminar (speaking for money).
Kinda silly, isn't it?
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