[...] Lawsuits against customers go hand in hand with DRM in limiting community buzz for a particular artist or song. It would seem that music is subject to the rules of the Google Economy too, but losing evangelists for the latest Britney Spears song wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Her record company is going to spend millions promoting the album anyway and teenage girls will buy it because it’s obvious. The problem, as Bob Frankston explains, is the non-obvious: DRM is a way of assuring that the “content owner” can maintain control. That seems innocuous in itself but it has the effect of limiting the marketplaces’ ability to change. This makes sense in limited cases as it allows investors to recoup the cost of their investment and make a profit but if DRM works too well it prevents growth. A marketplace is a dynamic system that keeps changing. Why doesn’t the marketplace simply devolve into chaos? The reason is that it is an evolutionary process – one that provides opportunity for creating new results. We can think of this opportunity in terms of Chris Anderson’s long tail — it represents the value to be discovered rather than what is obvious. [...]

[...] The patterns Boyd points to would certainly effect the Google Economy, our way of creating and identifying value based on linking structures. And though she’s emphasizing gender differences, the patterns show broad differences in linking patterns between content types as well. [...]

[...] You have to wonder what the guys at NY Times are thinking. They just announced a new service called TimesSelect. One of the things being made only available to TimeSelect subscribers is “daily columns from influential Op-Ed writers” according to the site. NY Times can not be blind to the Google Economy or to the rise of blogs. Increasingly bloggers who have their fingers on the pulse of politics, current events, and public interest stories are becoming the resource for people to get opinion pieces. So why would NY Times decide to launch a service that puts their colunists behind a pay service? Either they’re going bankrupt or there is a hidden agenda I’m not seeing. They have to be making plenty off their ad revenue on the site… [...]

[…] You have to wonder what the guys at NY Times are thinking. They just announced a new service called TimesSelect. One of the things being made only available to TimeSelect subscribers is “daily columns from influential Op-Ed writers” according to the site. NY Times can not be blind to the Google Economy or to the rise of blogs. Increasingly bloggers who have their fingers on the pulse of politics, current events, and public interest stories are becoming the resource for people to get opinion pieces. So why would NY Times decide to launch a service that puts their colunists behind a pay service? Either they’re going bankrupt or there is a hidden agenda I’m not seeing. They have to be making plenty off their ad revenue on the site… […]

thank you