Category: Publishing
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New book: Essays on Free Knowledge
Update: Available in paperback on Amazon – as an audiobook read by the author I published my first book this morning. The current cost is $9.95. It is a 270-page ebook, first published on Gumroad, where I’ll get a higher percentage. Buy via the embedded ad below, and after that, I’ll have a few notes…
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Toward a Superior News Service
Do you run a news startup that features original reporting—not just news aggregated from other sources? Do you want to make it a standout, the sort of service people will point to as “the best solution to all the problems with fake news”? Then I want to give you some free advice. And look in…
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Toward a social contract for social media
Last week, I led a “strike,” or boycott, associated with the hashtag #SocialMediaStrike, directed at the giant, centralized social media services. Though throttled by Twitter and no doubt by others, the brief campaign led to massive use of the hashtag, many people carrying out the strike, as well as dozens of news stories from around…
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We need to pay more for journalism. A lot more.
I’m going to say a few obvious things, and then then a few unobvious things, about the business model for news publishing. Obvious thing #1: One of the most consequential facts of the Internet age is that news content has become free of charge. We all watched in morbid fascination in the 1990s and 00s…
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Social media stupidifies and radicalizes us
Back when the buzzword switched from “Web 2.0” to “social media,” I started to get quite suspicious. When I was participating in online communities, I wasn’t propagating “media.” That is something that boring corporate media types did. What would those boring corporate media types, or rather their Silicon Valley equivalents, do with once-unconstrained, lively, frequently…
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Is it time to move from social media to blogs?
This began as a Twitter thread. I’ve finally put my finger on a thing that annoys me—probably, all of us—about social media. When we check in on our friends and colleagues and what they’re sharing, we are constantly bombarded with simplistic attacks on our core beliefs, especially political beliefs. “This cannot stand,” we say. So…
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EU copyright reform could threaten wiki encyclopedias
If we are to believe its critics, under the pending EU copyright reform legislation, the EU would implement a “link tax” across all of Europe. So if you link to a news article, for example, including a text snippet, then you’d have to pay a fee. When Spain tried this, Google News simply discontinued service…