::scr paying for it

[Simon Wistow]

On Thu, Feb 21, 2002 at 11:43:07PM +0000, jo walsh said:
> um, their point being? i don't get it. a bland collation of press
> releases, many headlines verbatim from thereg. ah well, their freedom to
> spend their time and bandwidth-money on the exercise. 

Morbid fascination I suspect. Or chroniclers of the changing of an age.

 
> simon w wrote:
> > The whole thought of paying for stuff online makes me shiver.

> i subscribe to salon. i'd happily pay for theonion, ntk, the guardian - or
> hell the telegraph according to personal preference - or exceprts of
> thereg. i'd pay a penny per streetmap lookup. frankly a micropayment or
> subscription service makes more sense to me than the current
> tipping/honour situation that seems so prevalent right now, where the
> conscientious few sustain the diffident greed of the many. 

I also pay for a few sites, many of which I don't get anything extra
from. I don't do this as much as I ought to which is stillmore than
most. I also buy tshirts and merchandise. On the other hand I screen
scrape a lot of stuff and have it mailed to me and/or collected on a
webpage. Aggregate journalism I think Dave Green once referred to it as. 

The reason it makes me shiver is because it signifies the end of an age
(sorry, I'm in a melodramatic mood today which makes a change from the
sarcastic, flamey, foul mood I've been in for the rest of this week).

Open Source/Free  software works (for various values of works) because
it doesn't cost you anything. The problem with running a popular web
site is that it does cost you something. When the traffic is low to
middling (the clutch of sites on the same box as thegestalt.org get a
fair bit of traffic between them but nothing that our current set up
can't handle) this isn't a problem. But when it gets high (such as what
happened to popbitch or slashdot or whatever) then you need to start
chucking hardware.

My point was that it's a shame that the number of people online now
means that this sort of popular hobbyist site gets 'punished' for being
popular.

The second reason it makes me shiver is that I can see it changing my
surfing patterns. Currently I randomly flit from site to site (I doubt
I'm alone in this) and sample the best of everything. I like that and it
gives me a depth and breadth of knowledge which would have been
difficult (or at least more difficult) pre-web. Because I'm the sort of
person who can't help watch the meter ticking up in a taxi, the idea of
having a little counter down in my task bar that shows how much I'm
spending bothers me. I think i will also have implications about surfing
at work.

I'm starting to ramble now so I'll shut up.

Simon






-- 
: it's pretty hard to look miserable when you're spinning on your head