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He doesn't even mention the other points, like trying to avoid linking to competing sites.

I'm not surprised. I don't think internet.com wants you outside "their channels". If that's their thought process, he really has nothing to apologize about...from their perspective. The anonymous LT stuff is another issue, and smells worse for them, but everyone wants to keep you inside channels.

Hell, at the new media company where I was Chief Editor, I got pressure from our Publisher not to link to stories that I commented on. That fact frustrated me greatly.

I recognized this one fact: we [in the corporate sense] were never going to be a single source for everyone. Point to good [or bad, to suit your purposes] content and amplify [or refute, TSYP] the points made there. If you amplify it, people will go, "Gee, I want to see what Geof has to say about this ESPN.com piece. He's written on this before..." If you refute it, people will also want to see what you have to say.

Come on, you know that you [in the /. Cabal sense] wait to see who responds first to M$FT FUD, and then you read the followers-on [notably RMS, if he didn't get FP on the FUD] to see what they amplify and what they don't. It's human nature to want to find someone to agree or disagree with. If new media companies will recognize that people will want to spend more time online reading content and might--GASP--pay for it.

The old saying goes something like, "If the mind can conceive and the heart can believe, the person can achieve." You've got to know what to do and believe that you can do it before you can make it happen.

Of course, if you'd told me about the leaps computer networks were making between the time I left Ohio in 1991 and moved to 'net-unaware Mississippi, when I didn't get access to the Internet until 1995 at my alma mater, I would have pestered my parents for the ability to stay connected in that four-year interregnum. Then I might have started writing about sports online a little bit earlier.

An interesting phenomenon...mod the parent of this comment up.

Ahhhh, but not every content business is like the porn industry. With porn, you have to pay:

• Talent.
• Photographers.
• Web developer/graphic designers.
• Site manager.

For me to be similar with our ezines, I'd have to pay:

• Our writers.
• Our editors.
• Web developers/graphic designers.
• Site managers.
• Marketroids.
• PR flacks.

With porn, once the image is captured, you're done. Porn talent can, er, display their wares anywhere they choose. My talent all get exclusivity clauses in their contracts, because our writers make our ezine. Also, except for sites focused around specific talent, I don't imagine that "viewers" want to interact with the talent. With writing, it's vitally necessary to the creative process.

I never thought I'd come to comparing my writers [as Chief Editor, I think of them that way, though I'm younger than almost all of them] to porn talent. I just hope like hell they don't find this thread...=)

Ask most any content producer what they want to get paid with, and they'll reply, "Micropayments." But it's because we use the term the wrong way.

After carefully reading Clay Shirky's comments on micropayments, he makes sense: paying before you're sure about the quality of something is a bad idea. Even with a respected content producer, how are you sure that they will maintain standards?

Case in point: Tom Clancy. I haunt alt.books.tom-clancy, and much discussion has raged there about the declining quality of his novels. Some have stated that they will never again rush to their bookstore on release day and pay full price for a first-edition hardback. I am almost to that point myself--because the quality hasn't been maintained.

What most of us content producers want is to charge, but not charge highly. We can't do it with credit cards--most folks know about the charges there. [What, you think Visa stays solvent just with our high balances? =) I wish.] So "micropayments" is our answer, although the traditional micropayment method [pay $0.NN for my bit o' content] isn't really what we want.

Here's where we are probably going:

1. Maintain our public archives for N months--probably a quarter. IOW, you can see stuff from 01/2001-03/2001, but you're screwed before then.
2. Maintain our email lists as no-charge subscriptions for those who don't wish to pay. Place ads on those lists.
3. Offer access to six years of articles in the archives if you're a subscriber. [Cost: $2-5/mo. That range is broad because we haven't done market research yet.]
4. Offer ad-free email lists if you just want the straight poppo. [Cost: $5-10/mo, depending on the list, market research, and how much it costs us in lost revenue. We probably wouldn't seek to make up all the "lost" ad revenue--probably offer a break of, say, 20-25% over what we'd bring in with ads.]

If anyone has comments on this system, I'd love to hear them. Since we're an ezine, we can try to adapt the magazine business model to the Internet, all the while trying to kill the notion that information and storage are combined. My rationale on charging for archive access is just like asking us to store your old copies of Sports Illustrated--as long as you don't mind if we peruse the swimsuit issue. [Carol Alt: yowza!]

Here's how I imagine an ezine conglomerate like TOTK.com Sports using micropayments:

1. Give access to our recent articles on the Web. As the original poster notes, if you haven't seen our content before, you have no way of knowing whether you'd want to pay for it. In terms of the current day, current content is a "loss leader" in that we "sell" it at cost--none, really, other than intellectual capital.
2. Charge for subscriptions via email. Since we hold our weekly content out a few days as an impetus to subscribe [note: we don't do that on dailies], there is incentive to get it in email. Also, email is great because you can read it offline, at your leisure, etc. A well-formatted ASCII ezine can be a joy to read if you don't let it run too long.
3. Charge for access to our Web archives. Presumably, if you're paying us, you like our content. =) If you like it, you'll like the archives, too, because you'll want to see what we've had to say about sports over the years. Also, with some of the articles, it makes for damned great research material, and some folks like that stuff.

Do I expect to make scads of money? Nope. I could make a shitload more, likely, if I got $5 CPM text ads in my various ezines. If you think that isn't a chunk of change, start running numbers of subscribers in the tens of thousands for a daily ezine--not bad work if you can get it [and run three to five ads per day]. But that's not what I want to do--I just want to cover costs and have pretty toys. If I wanted to work as a "professional", I'd have gone to journalism school.

...I both want and need micropayments to become a reality. Why? I look at the Consumer Reports business model--no ads--and see something that should easily work on the Web. However, I don't think that our sports content is good enough--yet--to merit charging CR-level prices. And in trying to go lower, we will get up by transaction fees and be in the same position as we are with Flycast.

Soon, I think a whole lot of DIY e-publishers are going to be with us. We love what we're doing, and we don't want to become rich sports boors [say hello, Mr. Sheffield], but we would like to cover costs and maybe even take a little home one of these days...

First, the "holy war" stance is adopted by someone who lists their Web site as "www.ihateapple.com"? Pardon me for saying this, but, "Pot, meet kettle."

Does Taco want /. to be print media? I doubt it. That means a lot of things, and I think Taco doesn't want to meet those "standards", if you call them that. I know that I don't consider TOTK.com Sports, which I run, or NASA Watch, which I really enjoy reading, to be "print media", but it doesn't hurt either in my opinion.

But the best thing is that Taco's comments made me read this blurb, and in reading it, I've come to realize more clearly the problems with DNS. That's enough for me.

We're not all mindless Taco ditto-heads, ya know.

...at TOTK.com Sports. We don't make money off of TOTK. We haven't run many ads to speak of--only Web ones with really bad CPM rates because of the dearth of banner ads, which is fine, because they suck--because we think they distract from content.

I asked readers once--online and offline, since some of them are local people--what they thought of ads. They aren't opposed to them, because they know we have to pay the bills. All well and good, but the ads will just be ignored, and where have we added value? Nowhere. But we wouldn't mind running relevant ads in our emails--be fine by us. But when we do get someone relevant, they either never reply or think we charge too much. Gah!

Because I continue to spend more time on this--instead of the rest of my so-called life--and because we're adding new technology along the way, we've decided to do a trial period idea, something I wouldn't mind feedback on. The idea is this:

1. Content that is newer than N weeks is free for viewing on the Web. That way, you can see what we have before you choose to subscribe.
2. Subscribing to email releases is free for N weeks, and we tell you that up front. This allows you time to get to know our content well--people will read what they willingly push themselves to read, and email is the best way to let consumers push themselves content--and decide whether you like it enough. [Hopefully, you do. =]
3. Becoming a paid subscriber would give you the ability to customize how we do things highly--columns only from this writer or on that sport or in that ezine, whatever--and allow you unlimited access to the archives.

Be happy to see what people have to say. Email or reply...I'll see it either way.

For an interesting insight into how perceptions can be shattered, read Jon Entine's book Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It. After I finish with our back-end coding project, I'm going to review a sports book a month at TOTK.com Sports. Entine's book is first on my list.

I've appreciated all the comments from my black friends here on /. on this issue. I think they're making the white folks think on this some. -g- Growing up in Mississippi, I've seen racism, and it ain't pretty. But I saw it in Ohio, too, and it was more oppressive there [in Dayton's suburbs] because of the paucity of non-Europeans.

The only beef that I have ever had with AA has been the fact that it is only a temporary solution. AA attempts to fix the end-product of generations of discrimination by giving opportunity to the disadvantaged after the fact. This is fine to an extent, but at some point, you have to accept two things:

1. Because not all areas of the country are homogeneous in economic terms, the quality of education will vary greatly across regional areas as well as other "normal" demographics.
2. The stigma of AA and quotas are that the [disadvantaged minority] are unable to compete otherwise.

As with any problem, it is much better to fix root causes than to try to make amends on end products. If you start building code and watch bugs from the beginning, you build better code. As a society, we should work to build better people by providing quality education along the entire educational track, focusing on improving standards and giving assistance to the youngest among us, regardless of socioeconomic status.

And yeah, there's racism in sports, people. Consider Scot Pollard's hair and Allen Iverson's. With Pollard, most folks think, "Dude, this guy's got style." With the Answer, most folks think, "Dude, this guy's a thug." Yet we don't know diddly shit about either one really.

I help run a set of sports ezines. We've always been fairly up-front with our readers -- we do this for fun, not for profit. We don't resell email addresses (despite the offers . . . the money's been nice, but no!). We don't gather funky data. We don't even use cookies, although we've considered it for reasons.

Now we're in a bind -- we're working on going "big time" and we need to back everything up. It helps that our Publisher's brother is a lawyuh.

One thing we are considering doing is open-sourcing our content management system. What we've got right now works, in a way, but to go where we want to, we've got to have a better engine under the hood. In fact, we've stopped adding another ezine or two at this point because of that fact. [Hint: Sports-minded geeks encouraged to contact me about helping out with the programming.]

We do have privacy and usage statements up there, but I think we snitched those from ESPN in large part -- I expect a lawsuit on copyright infringement any day now.

You know, when I first read this, I sat wondering about it. We at TOTK.com Sports run a great Web site, The Rodman Archive, which archives online content about Dennis Rodman. Much of the older archives -- about Dennis with some of his older teams -- are no longer available online. As many of you know, this is pretty common practice -- even Deja had to dump its online storage of NNTP for a short period of time.

In some ways, what we do is the same that Abandonware does -- if any publishing entity asks us to take down the content, we do so happily and willingly. Most of our readers consider it a great service -- they can watch the progression (and regression) of Rodzilla's career in the words of the nation's sportswriters.

But what we're publishing is content. What Abandonware pirates publish is code. I've got to wonder where you draw the fuzzy gray line -- between content and code, or to either side, right or wrong?

Why do I say that? I think the pirates are wrong, and that we are right. But that's damned petty.

Comments welcome and encouraged.

As an Internet publisher myself, I'm a bit miffed as to what's going on here. Sure, I publish stuff about sports, which is not exactly Earth-shattering in terms of societal impact (though I can argue for its societal worth, mind you), but what seems weird to me is that this is a way to hide behind the computer screen.

Looking at the root of the name of Publius -- familiar with the Federalist Papers myself, because I have to soon explain why we made all those changes in the UAH SGA last year anyway -- I see their point, but societal change is more often brought about by grassroots efforts led by out-in-front, standard-bearing individuals.

To demonstrate my point, could the American Civil Rights movement have progressed without someone like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., marching? Sure, he could have sat in Atlanta (or Memphis, or Selma, or . . .) and written beautiful works on what was wrong with the oppression of "Negroes" in American society. I dare say his impact was strengthened by his visible action.

Heck, to take it to a whole other level, Jesus Christ himself could have just written a bunch of stuff, but I guarantee fewer people would be affected by Christianity -- whether you have a positive or negative view of it -- without some decisive action in there.

Anonymity breeds a small hair of distrust. If you're going to take over the world, you've got to have people's trust.

Genomics has got to be the scariest thing that I can imagine happening to our global society. The powers that genetics have, the promise of curing horrible diseases and defect are truly awe inspiring and not inconsiderable, but the awful likelihood of misuse is greater. Our world is just not yet ready or responsible enough to handle such potent knowledge.

The form of genomics that has people scared has a name -- eugenics. We've done it in the animal world for centuries, even millenia. However, as Jon Entine notes in his book on the genotypic advantages of certain genetic populations in sports (review coming to TOTK.com Sports at some point), humanity has this nice habit of sleeping around. =)

It will be interesting to see if humanity is willing to breed along such lines. In some ways, it's already being done with sperm banks, etc. I don't know that it's the right way to go, but I can't make everyone's decisions for them.

See, the nasty bit with this is that genetic research has so much power to fix what's currently wrong (as taken from the norm) with the human organism in the singular. It remains to be seen whether we take the next step into attempting to improve on the human species . . . and I don't think that will be very pretty.