[Search-l] "directory" vs. "search engine"

[Seth Finkelstein]

On Tue, Jun 12, 2007 at 04:30:31PM +0200, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> On Jun 11, 2007, at 8:59 PM, Seth Finkelstein wrote:
> >> Consider bowling.  Some people get paid a lot of money to bowl.
> >
> > 	The fallacy in this analogy is they get paid a lot of money
> > because others like to watch them bowl, and hence their performance
> > has an economic value. Whereas there is very little economic value
> > in the average bowler's performance.
> 
> Well, I think the same is true for writing, is it not?  There is a
> lot of economic value in J. K. Rowling's writings.  And there is
> very little economic value in most people's writings.

	Indeed. And a driving financial innovation was the rise of
various ways that a small profit could be "harvested" and aggregated
into larger amounts, to enrich a very few people, based in part on
marketing to many (would-be) writer's unfulfilled ambitions. Nobody
has figured out a similar way to do that with bowling.

	And so the point of my analogy-reply is that if someone did
figure out a similar monetization, of how to extract/harvest the small
value of the average bowler's performance (e.g from a video reality
show), that same question would then arise.

	Lurking under this discussion is the almost-tautological issue
that if your business model is accumulating many small indirect
profits out of a huge number of people, you have got to get some way
of sucking-in that huge mass of people to "play". And that's not
necessarily "fun" (in many senses of the word).

>> 	And one fuel of blog-evangelism is in part the phenomena that
>> *many* people can be fleeced by dangling in front of them the social
>> status associated with published writers, and then profiting from them
>> in various ways.
> 
> I think this view fundamentally disrespects people who blog,
> assuming that they are being "fleeced".  I don't think many of them
> would agree with you.  I certainly don't.

	This is reply #1 when the strategy is pointed out - make a
populist appeal. Say someone is being taken by a confidence game?
That *disrespects* them! One can go even further - for example, if
someone wants to give all their money to a Nigerian scammer, well,
that's THEIR RIGHT, and who is any *MORALIST* to say what decisions
an adult can and cannot make with THEIR OWN MONEY!

	 It is why I find much of the "Web 2.0" cheerleading to be
so deeply morally corrosive.

> My point was simply that there is a fallacy involve whenever people
> notice that "gee, some people get paid money to do this, aren't the
> ones who aren't simply suckers who are working for free"? The
> answer is: no.

	That makes a strawman so you can knock it down. The situation
here is more like "Why do you want to work for free to make someone
else rich?"

	Which in fact lets me segue more on-topic. Open-source is not
about programmers donating free labor to corporations for them to
monetize. It's a serious value-exchange, and people should always keep
that in mind.

-- 
Seth Finkelstein  Consulting Programmer  http://sethf.com/
Infothought blog - http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/
Interview: http://sethf.com/essays/major/greplaw-interview.php