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Brandon Keim, freelance science writer, answers the question, "how do you handle the pressures of the job and what motivates you to get up in the morning?"
Malcom Gladwell's review of Chris Anderson's book, "Free" mentioned in a link I diigo'ed last week.
Gladwell takes issue with Anderson's agrument -- and seems to really have fun dissecting it:
"If you can afford to pay someone to get other people to write, why can’t you pay people to write? It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for 'non-monetary rewards.' Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels? Anderson’s reference to people who 'prefer to buy their music online' carries the faint suggestion that refraining from theft should be considered a mere preference. And then there is his insistence that the relentless downward pressure on prices represents an iron law of the digital economy. Why is it a law? Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power. 'Information wants to be free,' Anderson tells us, 'in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.' But information can’t actually want anything, can it? "
And later, I can feel Gladwell getting giddy and all riled up:
"For Anderson, YouTube illustrates the principle that Free removes the necessity of aesthetic judgment. (As he puts it, YouTube proves that 'crap is in the eye of the beholder.') But, in order to make money, YouTube has been obliged to pay for programs that aren’t crap. To recap: YouTube is a great example of Free, except that Free technology ends up not being Free because of the way consumers respond to Free, fatally compromising YouTube’s ability to make money around Free, and forcing it to retreat from the 'abundance thinking' that lies at the heart of Free. Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year. If it were a bank, it would be eligible for TARP funds."
Hmmm, what does "Anderson's Law" -- that in the digital age, the price of nearly everthing approaches free -- mean for journalism? Here's the most useful passage:
"Anderson sees many areas of digital content as obeying this law, including music, video, and video games (the big three 'shiny disc' industries), news, books, and e-mail. Under Anderson’s model, people will continue to pay good money to save time (that is, those who have more money than time will), lower their risk (such as paying to assure that their Second Life land will still be there, or that their operating system will be supported), because they love something (such as buying virtual items in free videogames), or to increase their status in a community."
So people pay for time, security and status -- not quality of information. However, news can perhaps *indirectly* provide users with some of those. That's the power of information, right?
Awesome pictures of an electronics reclamation facility by Jim Merithew.
If online tracking using a network of uses works so well for stalking celebrities, why not apply it to catching criminals?
From the article:
"G-Men these days have to focus more on stopping terrorists than nabbing old-school bank robbers. So FBI agents in Arkansas are enlisting the online public's help in catching the thieves. And it appears to be working. Four bank robberies have been solved in the past six months, thanks in part to tips collected from BanditTrackerArkansas.com, Little Rock special agent Steven Burroughs tells the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. In all, 10 suspected robbers featured on the site are now behind bars."
Trucks that run on manure? How could I NOT bookmark this?!
RIP Mars Phoenix Lander. But at least it served as fodder for some clever punniness...
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By the way, Google isn't rejecting the wisdom of the crowd. Once an author creates a knol, the general public can improve it. People can suggest corrections, edits and amendments to the content -- a technique Google calls "a moderated edit."
Readers can also leave comments alongside the content. While the author is the arbiter of the item itself, and can reject suggestions, he or she can't delete the comments. Users can also rate knols on a five-star scale.
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Hypermilers call the gadgets "game gauges" because they're always trying to see how high they can go. The best of them get absurd figures. Wayne Gerdes, founder of cleanmpg.com and the king of hypermilers, recently drove a Honda Civic hybrid 800 miles from Chicago to New York on a single tank of gas. That works out to 65 mpg.
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But that's just the beginning.
"I'd like to hit 70 mpg. Seventy would be pretty sick," he says. "It's doable."
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