Hard economic lessons for news
I saw this in the TechDirt Daily Email. Mike Masnick offered the following summary:
- Tradition is not a business model. The past is no longer a reliable guide to future success.
- “Should” is not a business model. You can say that people “should” pay for your product but they will only if they find value in it.
- Virtue is not a business model. Just because you do good does not mean you deserve to be paid for it.
- Business models are not made of entitlements and emotions. They are made of hard economics. Money has no heart.
- Begging is not a business model. It’s lazy to think that foundations and contributions can solve news’ problems. There isn’t enough money there.
- No one cares what you spent. Arguing that news costs a lot is irrelevant to the market.
One or more of these themes have been offered as justifications for semantic technologies, including topic maps.
I would add for semantic technologies:
- Saving the world isn’t a business model. Try for something with more immediate and measurable results.
- Cult like faith in linking isn’t a solution, it’s a delusion. Linking per se is not a value, successful results (by whatever means) are.
- Sharing my data isn’t a goal. Sharing in someone else’s data is.