--- the early days were chaos, and still nobody, no matter how smart he or she is, understands how it is going to unfold. and if the present is hard to predict, what of the future? people don't like admitting ignorance, so they not only re-write history, they pre-write the future. there is a big problem with this attitude: overconfidence. take the 'pay-as-you-go walled garden' online business. among people who publish what is rather deprecatingly called 'content' on the internet, there has been an often repeated refrain which runs thusly: 'users will eventually pay for content.' or sometimes, more petulantly, 'users will eventually have to pay for content.' it seems worth nothing that the people who think this are wrong. from today's vantage, we know that most 'walled gardens' have been disastrous. information wants to be cheap! the price of information has not only gone into free fall in the last few years, it is still in free fall now, it will continue to fall long before it hits bottom, and when it does whole categories of 'self-proclaimed' lucrative businesses will be either transfigured unrecognizably or completely wiped out, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. the interesting questions regarding free content, in other words, have nothing to do with bland 'end of free' predictions, or unimaginative attempts at restoring user-pays regimes. the interesting questions are how far the power of the creator to publish their own work is going to go. while we don't know what the end state of these changes will be, we do know that the shift in publishing power is epochal and accelerating. designboom puts ONE key ahead of everything else: you have to be able to sense where things are going. there is a tremendous shift slowly taking place. the old pyramid is crumbling, and it is an interesting thing to watch. I'm not talking about status, but about the nature of the knowledge. discussing about design, we want to reach and connect people. everybody is going to have to be learning something about something. but of course designboom has a business strategy too. designboom is an ad-supported website, the original and most obvious ways of making a living in the creative arts have usually been sponsorship and patronage, and the internet is no different. it may not be the classical renaissance model, but the medici would have understood. there are revenues from our 'walled garden' - designboom's popular online education sector 'design-aerobics'; designboom organizes meetings, exhibitions and huge international competitions; glad that's over til next year... keep on reading designboom birgit  ------- monthly designboom newsletter ------- ------- ? comments and contact us ? ------- |
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