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Two updates on things I wrote about in previous posts. First of all, The New York Times picked up the discussion on the use of You Tube as a search engine, or better yet, as the NYT calls it, as a reference tool. They wrote a very nice article (published in print on January 18th) which summarizes the different things that were already mentioned about this phenomenon in the blogosphere. The article also mentions Blinkx, a video search engine, which is actually very cool and indexes various online video platforms (YouTube, MySpace, Google Video etc.) so check it out. Funny though, how an established (print) medium like The New York Times uses the blogosphere to retrieve its content on current issues….
The second update is on some new evidence for the, what I have now rebaptised as, NIN-model (sorry Radiohead), based on the new digital Maecenic (now community based) culture, or as an article in Techdirt calls it, the turning-your-fans-into-promoters model. At the Monty Python’s YouTube channel, videos from Britains best comedy show ever, are streamed online, in High Quality versions. From the site:
“No more of those crap quality videos you’ve been posting. We’re giving you the real thing – HQ videos delivered straight from our vault. What’s more, we’re taking our most viewed clips and uploading brand new HQ versions. And what’s even more, we’re letting you see absolutely everything for free. So there! But we want something in return. None of your driveling, mindless comments. Instead, we want you to click on the links, buy our movies & TV shows and soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years.”
They have of course linked to Amazon, where you can buy their DVD’s directly, and yes, it worked again, helping them climb to No. 2 on Amazon’s Movies & TV bestsellers list.
Way to go Pythons!
The last couple of days I have started thinking about what the concept of free knowledge exactly entails. I want to dedicate a few future posts to this subject, in order to explore the idea to its fullest and to give it a proper categorization (at least I will try to). This can be seen as a first outline for a series on free.
A few thoughts come to mind when thinking about freedom if information:
- What does free exactly mean? What distinguishes free knowledge from or relates it to other concepts such as open science or open access, libre or gratis knowledge and ideas like creative commons, open content and copyleft?
- Is there a fundamental difference between freedom of information and freedom of knowledge?
- Is freedom of knowledge possible? And if so, what are the pros and cons of such a development; do we really want our knowledge to be free?
- Where does the idea of ‘information wants to be free’ originate form, and what is its historical context?
- What kind of different economic, political, social and philosophical issues play a role when we talk about free knowledge?
- Can we develop an economy of free, or a business model that revolves around free access? If so, what kind of possibilities or models are there (and which are sustainable?) and what are their pros and cons?
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