ARTS & FARCES internet

Since early February 1993, when we migrated our electronic publishing endeavors to the web, ARTS & FARCES internet has been a nonrival, nonexcludable, pure public good. Like public broadcasting or a lighthouse, it’s a pure public good in that everyone can use it and no one can force you to pay for using it. Moreover, ARTS & FARCES internet is a nonrival good: you can use it (mostly) all you want without reducing the content available to the next user. Finally it’s a nonexcludable good in the sense that anyone that finds the publication can use it.

Maybe it’s time to change our approach and make ARTS & FARCES internet an excludable good, available only to those who contribute in some way. After all, the costs to produce ARTS & FARCES internet are not insignificant, although the costs to replicate and distribute its content approach zero. While ARTS & FARCES internet has never been intended to be a profit center, one of the few polices we have is that every project must be fun and sustainable.

The ARTS & FARCES partners are currently re-examining our online publishing business model and while we hope to retain ARTS & FARCES internet as a nonexcludable good, we’re not married to the notion.

Since its inception in 1979, ARTS & FARCES has maintained an open books policy. We have a history of making our business models, plans, profit margins, and financials transparent to our stakeholders. So, let’s take a back-of-the-envelope look at the hard costs associated with sustaining ARTS & FARCES internet:

AlterNet has published a brief history of the U.S. pledge of allegiance by David Morris that accurately reflects this country’s fears and political evolution.

I remember being required to recite the pledge at the start of every schoolday until eighth grade, when my family moved to Texas. I don’t know if it was the changing political climate or some bizarre states’ rights thing.

Anyone else remember the “anguish language” version of the pledge: Hype ledger regents toothy flog….

Anyway, the original pledge, including the best part—“liberty and justice for all”—was written by a socialist Baptist minister.

In “Why the Wired West Still Matters,” J.D. Lasica posits that location matters in publishing. Lasica cites the inroads into publishing made by Wired (and its online HotWired offering), Slate, and Salon and attributes their success to their west coast locations. Or, rather, their collective “break” from the elite corporate media of the east coast; call it a west coast state of mind. The article is exceptionally well researched, sourced from interviews with John Battelle (formerly publisher of The Industry Standard and currently a teaching fellow at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism), David Talbot (founder and editor of Salon), and Josh Quittner (formerly managing editor of Time.com and currently editor of Business 2.0).

What Lasica and his sources miss—completely miss—is that the west coast has its own elite that is every bit as arrogant as the east coast media cartel they bemoan. When was the last time you saw a link on Salon or Slate to a weblog or an independently published essay? It just doesn’t happen. Why?

In the past six months, virtually every major breaking story has been broken first by the purveyors of personal media: weblogs, personal essay sites, and independent publications operating on a shoestring. This is especially true in the technology sector. When was the last time you read an important story first in CNET? About six months ago, right?

Fed up with the media elites on both coasts? Go ahead and roll your own; we’re watching….

Most of the best Internet radio stations are not webcasting today. Instead, they’re participating in the Day of Silence protest against the regulatory provisions developed by the Copyright Arbitration and Royalty Panel (CARP).

Doc Searls has been providing some of the best coverage of the CARP regulatory provisions and his “Silent Mayday” piece on the Linux Journal website is highly recommended.

Like the web’s initial triad of end-user tools, lowered barriers, and server protocols, the new triad of web services, weblogs, and WiFi are energizing the net at a grassroots level, according to Kevin Werbach in “The new WWW.”

Here’s Werbach’s overview:

• Web services are “the Legos of software;” components that can be combined in interesting ways to build things.
• Weblogs are personal content management systems.
• WiFi allows individuals or small groups to subversively connect via unlicensed wireless services.

Werbach observes that the common denominator between all three developments is that they lower barriers to communication. “The power of people using technology to connect to one another cannot be overestimated,” writes Werbach. Too bad that the technology industry is only now beginning to grasp this concept and the entertainment industry will perish if it doesn’t.

Werbach also points to the NEC web modeling study that indicates a relatively flat traffic distribution among websites in some topic categories. Publications and entertainment topic categories, for example, have relatively few sites attracting the bulk of web traffic while the traffic among the sites of photographers is more evenly distributed.