Sarah Perez, a blogger I respect highly has written a post on Read Write Web that I feel will open the eyes of many bloggers towards what I believe to be the coming issue with blogging for money in general: control over content.
This is something that I knew was coming as the RIAA started to fight for control over music, and now the fight for content freedom has expanded to movies, and while both of these are fighting a losing war, it was only a matter of time before the profitability of raw textual content started to see more of the same issues.
It is summed up nicely in the post:
It’s not just bloggers whose content is being used, shared, and profited from today – perhaps now bloggers can begin to appreciate what other industries, like the recording industry or the movie-making industry, has had to face in this new digital age.
What this means for us as bloggers and new media creators is that the very technologies that we have grown to love are the same forces that are turning our efforts, be them our words, our videos, our music, our photos, or anything we create, into a commodity – something that has little monetary value on its own, but in aggregate, can become something of value.
This could mean that data on its own won’t be of great value, but filters, like TechMeme, and other services will feed our ever increasing need for content and make big money doing it.
You have to read through this post. Let it all sink in before giving your opinion on this, as the implications are, at least in my mind, very far reaching.
