Hard News by Russell Brown

Weird is Good! Absolutely. Not the Record industry but Asbergers. Thank you so much the Brown family for such a healthy, funny, sad and optimistic contact. Actually "Weird is Good" could be the flagship motif.

Weird is Good! Absolutely.

Wasn't that great? All his own idea too.

Oh I can't wait to read the letters to the editor in Britain, I suspect 90% will be something along the lines of "I pay/d my licence fee and I have to pay again?!" etc.

I pay/d my licence fee and I have to pay again?

Some justification for that whinge? The BBC should really provide access to everyone with their TV license.

However that's a slippery slope for them. If they access control BBC content on the Internet, then the next step would be to do the same on broadcast media (Freeview, Sky, Cable). Having done that, it becomes a lot more glaring that the license fee is to extract money from those who *don't* want the service - and bring in pressure to make it a conventional subscription.

I'm not actually arguing against making it free for Britain, I just suspect it could be rather costly if there was a complete digital archive of the BBC online. I believe the BBC is already trying to radically cut costs.

Thanks for the link to the PDF (20 things) Russell - I found it to be quite the eye opener. In particular the section about the "long tail" and the changes to how the economics work when you are restricted by how much stock you can hold (never have a scarcity of supply). What also really made an impact was the idea that the age of the hit is over - and that certainly raised some questions (for myself) about how the NZonAir funding is done for music - at the moment they are trying to concentrate on "hits" as such, but it seems like this is a losing approach...

Anyway I found it really interesting - thanks!

thanks for the link Russell,.. like you, I've been slightly out of touch for five days....but mine was a conscious avoidance of any cyber link whilst in big bad old Jakarta on a holiday. My first five days without the net of any sort for the best part of a decade I think. JKT is incredibly wired but I simply didn't.

Dubber's follow up to that story was rather interesting too, as he found himself having to explain basic copyright parameters to the staunch Mr Birch