(iverson's) currentbuzz: Is this analysis useless? King Gillette might have made it so.

Sorry, but I think that Jonathon Handel's analysis might be useless content, though it is titled "Is Content Worthless?" He asserts that he can list the reasons (even enumerating them -- he lists six) for loss of value:

Everyone focuses on piracy, but there actually six related reasons for the devaluation of content.

Source: huffingtonpost.com

If he had written this six years ago, there might be reason to pay attention to what he says. He is listing what I would call obvious examples of changes that are disrupting a particular form of business that had evolved in the USA and elsewhere at the trailing end of the Industrial Age, when the economic principle that determined value was scarcity of physical resources and goods, and the fixed costs associated with the production and distribution of physical goods.

Physical goods have not vanished from our lives, nor have we found a way to live without them, however, the rise and proliferation of the kind of content which Handel is calling "worthless" -- ideas and processes that can be shared electronically because they are digital -- has given rise to new economic models. What is scarce today is attention and time (these are probably related, as you have to allocate time to pay attention to anything.)

The original QWERTY keyboard, anathema to many of us, was designed to *slow down* fast typists, in the days when typewriters were mechanical and the arms would jam if the typist was able to type too quickly. This need for step-down mechanisms was commonplace in the age of Scarcity. When access to information is scarce, because of the cost of production and distribution of books, you put one expert (the teacher) who serves as an information source and a governor (in the mechanical sense) of information flow at the head of a group of learners. The fastest learners are slowed down, the slowest need to be speeded up, so that the pace of the group matches the speed of information flow possible in a pre-digital age. Embodied content that has to printed, bound, duplicated, and distributed has to be expensive.

Free the content from an expensive embodiment, and the content becomes "free" because it is only a connection or pathway to what is valuable. Thus, in music these days, bands are making money by playing in front of people -- live audiences -- who have become aware of them and connected to them via electronic information which is free but hardly useless.

Bloggers who are really just people with ideas, and any other content creators, get connected to audiences which find value in meeting with the content creator in order to get some added value they will pay for, from the content creator. This might be in the form of a performance, access to some exclusive information, or help installing or otherwise using the information that was initially available freely.

This is what the Open Source movement and Creative Commons are about. Read Eric Raymond's classic piece on the Cathedral and the Bazaar, as Handel should have done before he wrote about the worth of content. The free issue of Wired is also a good source for those who want to understand how you can make money or gain value by giving content away for free. The shift in economic paradigms is disruptive and it will cause some dislocations for workers and content creators, but it hardly means that content is worthless.