Michael Becker's Profile

The idea, according to the entrepreneurs who are developing such services for Twitter and other Web networks, is that people trust recommendations from those they know and respect, while they increasingly ignore nearly ever other kind of ad message in print, on television and online.

“We don’t want to create an army of spammers, and we are not trying to turn Facebook and Twitter into one giant spam network,” said Joey Caroni, co-founder of Peer2. “All we are trying to do is get consumers to become marketers for us.”

Twitter is to web pages what web pages are to old media. Our experience of information is once again about to become fragmented and dispersed.

My own worry is that I’m twittering more and blogging less. Twitter satisfies my desire to share. That’s mostly why I blog – and that’s what makes the best blog posts, I’ve learned. I also want to store information like nuts underground; once it’s on the blog, I can find it. But when I share links on Twitter, they’ll soon disappear. I also use my blog to think through ideas and get reaction; Twitter’s flawed at that – well, I guess Einstein could have tweeted his theory of relativity but many ideas and discussions are too big for the form – yet I now use Twitter to do that now more than this blog.

Envisioning a newspaper as a product, rather than a mere delivery mechanism, taps into a mindset already present in adjacent industries. Savvy musicians and filmmakers long ago embraced limited-run exclusive editions aimed at the top one percent of their fans. That’s why the box set exists: to satiate fanatics. On the publishing side, Sports Illustrated cranks out hard-bound “championship” collections for all of the major leagues. There’s precedent here. And with some newspapers already gravitating toward a glossy magazine aesthetic, it’s not too far fetched to imagine big, bold broadsheets emerging as a high-end option for discerning news collectors and memory seekers.

I think that Rupert is betting that one of Google's badly trailing competitors can be coaxed into paying for the right to index all of News Corp's online stuff, if that right is exclusive. Rupert is thinking that a company such as Microsoft will be willing to pay to shore up its also-ran search tool, Bing, by buying the right to index the fraction of a fraction of a sliver of a crumb of the internet that News Corp owns.

That's my theory: Rupert isn't a technophobic loon who will send his media empire to the bottom of the ocean while waging war on search engines. Instead, he's an out-of-touch moustache-twirler who's set his sights on remaking the web as a toll booth (with him in the collector's seat), and his plan hinges on a touchingly naive approach to geopolitics.