Purchasing

Richard G. Weissman

FREE Flow of Information
September 19, 2007

As an academic, a native of northern New Jersey, and an avid New York Yankee and New York Giants fan, I come to depend on the New York Times for some pretty good news coverage. I've also come to like their business, op-ed, and sports columnists for their insights and relatively long articles and essays. And, it was all free on the Web. That is until a couple of years ago when they made the part of the paper that I enjoyed "paid content".

I must have not been the only one who refused to pay for it. Today, I received an e-mail telling me that all of the content, and archives for that matter, are free. They said that the Web has moved to a free content model and that they were joining that model. Obviously if they were making money on paid content they would have kept it, but that is the subject for another post.

The web is changing very rapidly. Yes, there is a lot of spam, phishing, spoofing, and the like, but there are also good pockets of content. Social networking applications like MySpace and Facebook are starting to find corporate applications. More and more software is being hosted on the web, saving time and money. Just think how often you go to the web for information. The web is critical for business and there are eight times more business to business transactions on the web than business to consumer. For most of us, it is part of our daily lives.

But as we say in the Big Apple: You ain't seen nothin' yet.

Posted by Richard G. Weissman on September 19, 2007 | Comments (0)