MicroPayments - Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers « Clay Shirky

With continued turmoil in the advertising market, people who work at newspapers and magazines are wondering if micropayments will save them, with recent speculation in this direction by David Sarno of the LA Times, David Carr of the NY Times, and Walter Isaacson in Time magazine. Unfortunately for the optimists, micropayments — small payments made by readers for individual articles or other pieces of a la carte content — won’t work for online journalism. To understand why not, there are two key pieces of background.

Click to read more ...

Why Julian Assange, Founder, Wikileaks Models Great Creative Leadership - TED video

In watching this video, you can see the emergence of a genuine creative leader at work. Creative leadership requires conviction and commitment with one component marking out the great creative leaders from the others - personal risk!! The great creative leaders in our world, Socrates, Joan of Arc, J.B. Priestley, Nehru, Nelson Mandela to name just a few all took great personal risks to ensure their beliefs in one way or another effected the world in which we live for the common good. Whilst it is difficult to say just exactly what the common good is, universally we know it when we see it and we know when the common good is not being served. Historically the sign of a great creative leader is when someone takes the risk to speak out against entrenched power that we know refuses to allow proper debate regardless of the risks.Julian Assange, Founder of Wikileaks has done that.Watch the video!!

Click to read more ...

The Contrast and Tension In Quality Between Online Aggregation and Original Content Explored - John Blossom

Quality is as quality does"may not be a saying that came out of Forrest Gump's mouth but it's a simple formula that seems to be proving itself on the Web as traditional sources of quality content lose audience share to search engines and social media sites. At the same time, though, the ever-increasing popularity of social media sites does not always seem to be balanced by mature quality control. But don't mistake immature techniques with inadequate potential: the techniques used to generate social media are carving out a new path to content quality that's here to stay. Professional publishers find themselves oftentimes railing against the Web as a devil's den of half-baked information and hailing the quality of their content. And, as underscored by ongoing issues with Wikipedia content quality and conflicts of interest, there are some real concerns out there in the world of user-generated content.

Click to read more ...

Devising An Opera On-line Using Crowdsourcing.

This is one of the most creative online endeavours I have seen - devising an opera on line using the crowdsourcing method. It is worth just visiting the web site to watch the project unfold.

Innovating the 21st-Century University: It’s Time! by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

This lengthy and yet highly important article in my view forms the basis of a really important discussion that is now occuring globally. Here Tapschott and Williams offer a cogent and compelling plan for re-inventing universities for 21st Century. Read this article and forward it to every single person you know is involved in education. "Encyclopedias, newspapers, and record labels have a lot in common. They all are in the business of producing content. They recruit, manage, and compensate capable producers. Their products are composed of atoms — books, papers, CDs, DVDs — and are costly to create and distribute. Their products are proprietary, and they take legal action against those who infringe their intellectual property. Because they create unique value, their customers pay them, and they have revenue. Their business is possible because of scarcity: quality news, information, knowledge, learning, art.

Click to read more ...