Comment is free, but some things aren't

Thursday, 29th November 2007

"An example of the abuse the inner circle of technology and media bloggers metes out to anything that does not fit its vision of how the world ought to work..." FT biz correspondent, John Gapper says reactions to the launch of Kindle show the blogosphere at its worst:

Kindle's offence is two-fold. First, it is a proprietary device that does not simply plug into an open network to send and receive data. Second, Amazon is charging Kindle users to download some content to their Kindles - notably blog feeds, which is a bad place to start if you want to please bloggers.
...Amazon is acting perfectly rationally in financial terms...The problem is that Silicon Valley and the blogosphere has a preferred financial model. You pay for the cost of monthly broadband access at home or at work and everything you read or watch on the internet should be free, either because it is given away or because it is advertising-funded.
There is nothing wrong with that model, even if some established media outlets that are used to charging subscriptions in print do not like it. But there are other ways of doing business and I don't think it is wrong or "stupid" to experiment with them... That is not the attitude of a lot of bloggers, who are very quick to start yelling at anyone who does not obey their preferred model for not "getting it" or being idiots.