Recently, Canonical Ltd., the company which sponsors the Ubuntu family of GNU/Linux distributions recently announced the UbuntuOne service, which is at it’s core a service that allows users to synchronize files between multiple Ubuntu-based machines. Having your files sync between multiple machines is a huge feature, and the truth is that there aren’t really good solutions that accomplish this task, for any operating system. At the same time there’s been a lot of hubbub in the community over this release. It’s complex but the issues in the complaint are:

1. UbuntuOne is a non-free project, in that, the software that’s powering the service (on the servers) is not being distributed (in source, or binary) to the users of the service. While the client is being open sourced, the server component is crucial important to users’ autonomy.
2. Ubuntu, if we are to believe what Canonical says, is the name of a community developed Linux distribution based on Debian. Canonical, is a for-profit organization, and it’s using the Ubuntu name (the trademark to which it owns) for a non-free software project.
3. Canonical has also gone back on a promise to release the software that powers LaunchPad under the AGPL. While this isn’t directly related to the flap surrounding Ubuntu One, it allows us to (potentially) contextualize the ongoing actions of Canonical with regards to network services.

My response comes in three parts.

Part One, the Technology

File syncing services are technologically pretty simple, and easy to create for yourself. I use ssh and git to synchronize all of my files, data, and settings between machines. I keep the sync manual, but I could automate it pretty easy. It’s not free, I pay a small monthly fee for some space on a server, but it works, and I have total control over the process.

Granted, my solution is a bit technical and requires some babying along, and works because 95% of my files are text files. If I had more binary files that I needed to sync, I’d probably use something like rsync which is a great tool for keeping large groups of files synchronized.

In fact rsync is so good, you can probably bet that UbuntuOne is using rsync or some rsync-variant (because it’s GNU GPL software, and it’s good.) If you’re running OS X, or any GNU or Linux based operating system then the chances are, you’ve already got rsync installed. Pulling together something to keep your files synced between more than one machine just requires a few pieces:

• something that runs on your computer in the background that keeps track of when files change so that it can send the changes to the server. Conversely this component can also just run on a timer and send changes ever x amount of time (five minutes? if the computer isn’t idle.)
• something that runs on the server that can send changes to other computers when the other computers say (“Has anything changed?”).

Done. I’m no programmer--as I’m quick to attest--but I think that I could probably (with some help,) pull together a tutorial for how to get this to work in a few hours.

Part Two, Trademarks, Centralization and Community

I think a lot of people feel betrayed by the blurring of this “thing” that a community has built (Ubunutu) with Canonical Ltd.

Which is totally reasonable, but this is largely an orthogonal problem to the problem with UbuntuOne, and I think is a much larger problem within the free software/open source/crowd sourcing world. This is one of the problems when entrusting trademarks and copy rights to single entities. In a very real way, Canonical--by using UbuntuOne--is trading on the social capital of the Ubunutu community, and that leaves a sour taste in a lot of peoples mouths.

But the issue of ceding control over a name or a product to a centralized group, is something that we have a lot of experience with, with varying results. Some thoughts and examples:

Here’s one example: There’s a huge “open source” community that’s built up around the commercial/proprietary text editor TextMate for OS X. While I think TextMate is really great software, and the TextMate community is made up of really great people, TextMate is largely valuable because of the value created by the community, and it exists (tenuously) on the good graces of the owner of the TextMate intellectual property. While Alan is a great guy, for whom I have a great deal of respect, if anything were to happen to TextMate a lot of people would find that they had nothing to show for their energy and efforts in the TextMate community.

Similarly, MySQL AB (and later Sun Microsystems and now Oracle) owns the entire copyright for the MySQL database, which isn’t (or wasn’t) a major issue for most developers in the early days, but now given the sale of that company (and it’s copyright holdings) puts the development of that code-base into some doubt. I’ve seen, as a result, much greater buzz around the PostgreSQL project as a result of this doubt, and I think this kind of fall out serves as a good example of what can happen to a community when the centralized body fails to act in the interests of the community, or even threatens to.

This is a huge issue, in the whole “web 2.0”/mashup/social networking/social media space. The logic for the proprietors of these sites and services is “build something, attract users create a REST API that makes it easy for people to develop applications using our service that add value to our service, attract more users, stomp out competition in the space, profit.” This is basically, the Twitter/Facebook/ning business model, and while it works to some degree it’s all built upon: stable APIs and the enduring good will of the community toward the proprietors of the service. Both of these are difficult to maintain, from what I’ve seen, as the business model isn’t very coherent, and requires the proprietors to balance their own self interest, their community’s interests, and find some way to profit in light of an unstable business model. It’s tough.

Part Three, Business and Free Network Services.

I’ve been treading over ideas related to free network businesses and cooperatives and software freedom for weeks now, but I swear it all fell into my lap here. Some basic thoughts, as conclusion for this already too lengthy essay:

• The UbuntuOne service, like most free network service, is at it’s core providing a systems administration service rather than some sort of software product. The software, is relatively trivial compared to making sure the servers are running/accessible/secure
• The way to offer users’ autonomy is to develop easy/free systems administration tools, and to educate them on how to run these systems.
• Corporations, while important contributors to the free software community, also inevitably serve their own interests, while it’s disappointing to see Canonical go down the proprietary track, it’s neither surprising nor a betrayal. Canonical has put on a good show and accomplished a great deal, but in retrospect we can imagine a number of things that they could have done differently from way back that would have changed the current situation. (eg. Worked within the Debian Project, developed a tighter business model, etc.)
• Free software, is very pro-business, but it’s not very pro-big-business, as “native free software business models” are built on personal reputations rather than tangible products. It translates to making an honest living pretty well, but it doesn’t convert very well into making a lot of money quickly.

Anyway, I better get going. Food for thought.

As I mentioned in my link collection post, my thinking about co-operative economics has taken a brief foray into the area of leadership and governance, both on the small scale (eg “How do we organize our project, to acomplish our goals”) and on the larger scale (eg. “How do provide institutional support for the governance of our civilization”). Both are important and relevant questions, but it’s all complicated of course. Also, we should probably start of with a brief interlude of what an individuals labor/work activity might look like in a post-corporate economy, and then I’ll move into two interludes about leadership and government. Seat-belts fastened?

Post-Corporatism and Labor

We’re seeing some post-corporatism in the forum of an explosion of freelance and independent consultancies of various stripes and colors. Some key observations:

• Many if not most people working in this don’t work full time for one employer, splitting their time and energies between a number of projects.
• Freelance work allows people to develop flexible careers where growth isn’t dependent on moving into management careers.
• Traditional “benefits” of employment (eg. health insurance, office resources, data connectivity, etc.) are increasingly procured either through ad-hoc agreements: eg. Marriage for health insurance, Co-working spaces, “Freelancers’ Unions” and so forth.

Leadership and Co-Operative Governance

The question that I think I’ve failed to really address in during all of this “co-op” conversation is If corporations are replaced by cooperative organizations, how are projects managed and where does leadership come from? Indeed one of the biggest benefits/strengths of the corporation (top-down) model, is that corporations are really (or at the least reasonably) well organized and constituted, so if we’re doing away with the corporation, how do we remain organized and productive.

I should, as an interlude, reiterate that I’ve advocated for cooperative organizations on the basis that they’re more effective at creating real and authentic value, than the American/multinational corporation as we now know it. Furthermore, I’m totally convinced in the necessity and utility of effective leadership and management, for our productivity. The post-corporate economy isn’t a world without management, but rather a world with a smarter, more distributed system for management.

Part of the distribution of management comes from the fact that labor itself is to be more distributed. Just as we bring on engineers, artists, manufacturing in an often ad hoc way, we might also bring on project management and other “logistical professionals” to promote productivity. (Remember that coops are organizations that are unlikely to involve the direct labor of more than 100 or 150 people at any given time.) Higher level administration and guidance can be provided by small elected/nominated executive councils (a la, the KDE project, the Squeak Project, or the Debian Project) or in the “benevolent dictator” model (eg. Linus’ for Linux, Larry Wall for Perl, Guido for Python, Dries for Drupal, Matt Mullenweg for WordPress, Rasmus for PHP, etc.)

Another “inherent” solution for providing management derives from the fact that cooperatives have a more pervasive project-based and goal oriented focus. Cooperatives, then, like open source software development projects, work on making something of value, (or providing valuable services,) don’t need to expend resources maintaining solubility. When a co-op finishes it’s project, the members move on to other projects and co-ops.

I think creative thinking about leadership in new environments requires a few basic assumptions:

• Democracy is created by participation rather than by elections.
• Management/logistical overheads grow geometrically while operations grow arithmetically.
• Co-ops would exist to both create value, and serve the interests of its members. Corporations exist to serve the interests of the investors. The dissolution of a cooperative isn’t antithetical to the purpose of a cooperative in the way that it totally antithetical to the purpose of a corporation.

Land and the Problem of Government

I’m persistently convinced that the “State” (as in the United States) or province (in the Canadian/Australian sense) is probably a really ineffective way to organize and structure a government. A lot of the people who are object to the American government advocate for states-rights and taking power and authority from the federal government and handing it to the states (eg. Libertarians). This has always struck me as sort of foolish.

Not because I think local control is a bad thing, or I have any great love of the institutions of liberal democracy, but rather because States themselves fail to convey meaningful/practical/useful administrative or political units. A co-operative ethos would require (and need, though not--strictly speaking--depend upon,) a system where institutions and governance transpired along meaningful and practical political units.

Greater metropolitan areas make sense as administrative units (including those that straddle existing borders) in a way that states themselves don’t really. Gary Indiana and the City of Chicago have a lot more in common than Chicago and Carbondale Illinois. At the same time there’s a big problem with the city-state, as “the unit of government:” it fails to account for, integrate, capture, and empower people in less urban areas. Which is given the importance of food, is incredibly crucial.

I’m interested in thinking about how, particularly with new technologies, we might be able to conceptualize geographically based political units that integrate populations that fairly represents the interests/needs of people who live in areas with lower population densities.

Here’s another in the train of posts about economics and sustainability. I started with meditations on cooperatives, and openness and martian economics, and then business in network service. And finally, a brief thought on the state of contemporary marriage. This post takes a step back so that I can talk about what I mean by sustainability, which I think requires a bit of a sidestep into thinking about ecology and the environment.

Sustainability, as I’ve come to think about it seems to be more about directing economic activity toward independence, an self sufficiency rather than toward “growth,” (the for-profit model) and charitable/philanthropic goals (the non-profit model).

No sooner do I say this, and I realize that being a proponent of sustainable approaches to economics makes me seem like something of an economic isolationist, and I think that’s the wrong direction. The problem with sustainability isn’t just that it’s hard to accomplish in pragmatic terms, but also hard to think about. We simply don’t have structures or models for people and groups who want to make an honest living creating new things (eg. fiction, computers, cabinets, software, agriculture/comestibles, pharmaceuticals, plumbing, newspapers, etc).

Sure, we know how to make things, and most of us manage to make a living at it, but our economic models rely on lots of growth and expansion in order for capital to be available (cite: current economic crisis). The missing piece--it seems to me--is a more systems-based approach to economic development and corporate organization.

Sustainability is, after all, an ecological idea and in this context. And discussions of the environment and ecology seem way more focused on sentimentality, hydrocarbon intput/output, and humanity’s impact on the environment in the context of our existing (non sustainable) business practices and not enough time thinking about our business practices in environmental terms. But taking an “ecological” approach to economics signifies (in my mind) attention to the economy as a whole, and sustainability as a practice, and that seems like it would be a good thing.

In the Mars books (which have been quite influential in this series) a few characters float the notion of an “eco-economics” where currency (such as it exists), are based on caloric input and output. Which is a nifty way to think about it. The strongest part of the martian government (near the end of the series) is a regulatory “environmental court” that attempts to manage the ecological/economical activities on a global scale. They’re reasonably effective at this.

I return the Mars books because they’re fresh in my mind, and because they present a possibility that’s both radically different from our current system and that attends to the weight of our history. I don’t think that the Robinson-Mars solution is the answer to our economic problems but it does force us to say “20th centry growth-levels are unsustainable, and undesirable,” and that “from a systems-based approach (if no other) capitalism is unstable.” And that’s a useful thought exercise.

As is the project of thinking about economics in environmental terms. Not because it will diminish human impact on ecologies--though it may--but because that sort of systems approach will lead to more sustainable economies and better lives for all parties to that activity--human and environmental.

That’s a worthwhile goal.

A (gay) friend was talking about the ongoing drama of his parents (decades old) divorce. I said, “I don’t get this whole [gay] marriage thing.”

“Right,” he said.

“I mean, whatever, but I think we need to work on convincing straight people to not get married rather than convincing states to let us get married,” I said.

“It’ll never happen,” he said.

“Right, besides we’d need better Corporate law, and good luck seeing that happen,” I said. “I mean what we really need are ways to incorporate sustainable co-operatives without the concepts/burdens for-profit/non-profit entities.”

Which is, if you’ve ever wondered, what its like to live in my head.

When we get down to the heart of the issue, marriage has a lot to do with inheritance, powers of attorney, legal agent-representation stuff (is that different than powers of attorney), relationships and families are orthogonal.

This isn’t to say that either the importance of the combined legal entity of a married couple or the legal recognition of a relationship/family isn’t a valuable institution, but marriage seems to be a poor implementation of either and both.

I’ve been reading the autonomo.us blog and even lurking on their email list for a while, so I’ve been thinking about “free network services,” and what it means to have services that respect users’ freedom in the way that we’ve grown to expect and demand from “conventional” software. This post explores issues of freedom in network services, business models for networked services, and some cyborg issues related to network services. A long list indeed, so lets dive in.

I’ve been complaining on this blog about how much web applications, the web as a whole, and networked services on the whole suck. Not the concepts, exactly, those are usually fine, but suck for productive users of computers, and for the health of the Internet that first attracted me to cyberculture lo these many years ago. I still think that this is the case, but I’ve come to understand that a lot of the reason that I have heretofore been opposed to network services as a whole is because they’re sort of brazen in their disregard users freedom.

This isn’t to say that services which do respect users’ freedom are--as a result--not sucky, but it’s a big step in the right direction. The barrier to free network services is generally one of business models. Non-free network services center around the provider deriving profit/benefit from collecting users’ personal information (the reason why open-id never caught on), from running advertising along side user-generated content (difficult, but more effective than other forms of on-line advertising because the services themselves generally provide persuasive hooks to keep users returning,) or when all else fails, charging a fee.

So to back up for a minute, I suppose we should cover what it means to call a network service “free.” Basically, free network services are ones where fundamentally users have control over their data. They can easily import and export whatever data they need from the providers system. That users can choose to participate in the culture of a networked computing by running software on their computer. There are ideas about copy-left and open source with regards to running code on networked services that are connected to these ideas of freedom, but this is more a means to an end (as all copy-left is) rather than--I should think--an end in itself.

Basically, data independence and network federation or distribution. Which takes all of the, by now conventional, business models and tears them to bits. If users are free to move their data to another service (or their own servers) then advertising, leveraging personal information are all out of the window. Even free software advocates look at this problem and say, we have a right to keep network services closed. Which is understandable given that there aren’t many business models in the free world. While a lot of folks in the FNS space are working to build pillars of free network technologies, I think some theoretical work on the economics are in order. So here I am. Here are the ideas:

• The primary “business” opportunity for free network service is in systems administration, and related kinds of tasks. If the software is (mostly) open source and design and implementation can’t possibly generate enough income, then keeping the servers running, the software up-to date, and providing support to users is something that provides and generates real value and is a concrete cost that users of software can identify with and justify.
• Subscription fees are the new advertising. In a lot of ways what a particular service provides (in addition to server resources) is a particular niche community. While federation changes this dynamic somewhat, I think often people are going to be willing to pay some fee to participate in a particular community, so between entrance fees (like meta-filter) and subscription fees (like flickr) you should be able to generate a pretty good hourly rate for the work required.
• Enterprise Services. We could probably support free network services (and the people behind them) by using those networks as advertisements for enterprise services. See a service on the Internet, and have a company deploy it for internal use on their intranet, and have the developers behind it sell support contracts.
• Leach money from telecoms. This is my perpetual suggestion, but while most of us Internet folks and network service developers may or may not be making money from our efforts in cyberspace, the telecoms are making money in cyberspace hand over fist, largely on the merits of our work. It’s not really possible to bully Ma’ Bell, but I think it’s a part of the equation that we should be focusing on.
• Your Suggestion Here. The idea behind business in the free network service space, is that providers are paid for concrete value that they provide, rather than speculation on their abstract value, and as a result we can all think about business models without harming the viability of any of these business models.

I’ve been thinking, in light of the Oracle purchase of Sun Microsystems, about the role of big companies in our economy, the role of competition, and what open source business models look like. This is a huge mess of thoughts and trains but I have to start somewhere.

• The Hacking Business Model isn’t so much a business model, as it is an operations model for hacker-run business. In that light it’s a quite useful document, and it’s understandable that it mostly ignores how to obtain “revenue” (and therefore, I think, falls in to the trap that assumes that new technology creates value which translates into income, when that doesn’t quite work pragmatically.)

I’m interested in seeing where this kind of thing goes, particularly in the following directions:

• Where does capital come from in these systems? For start-up costs?
• Where and how do non-technical (administrative, management, support, business development) staff/projects fit into these sorts of systems?
• The conventional wisdom in proprietary software (and to a lesser extent in free software) is that in order to develop new technology and improve existing technology code-bases need to compete with each other, and I don’t really think that this is the case in open environments.

I’m not sure that the competition between Solaris, the BSDs, and Linux (augmented as they all are by GNU to various extents) pushes each UNIX/UNIX-like operating system to improve. Similarly, I don’t know that having vim and emacs around keeps pushing the development of the text-editor domain.

At the same time, competition does help regulate--after a fashion--the proprietary market. Having Oracle’s database products around help keep Microsoft’s database products on their toes. OS X spurs development in Windows (usually). Without serious competition we get things like the ribbon interface to Microsoft Office (ugg), and telecoms.

This ties into my work and thinking on distributed version control systems, but I think in open systems, (particularly where branching is supported and encouraged,) the competition can happen among a team or with one’s own history. We pitting code bases against each other seems to not make a great deal of economic sense.

• I wish I had access to demographic data, but I suspect that there are few if any open source projects with development communities that are bigger than ~100-150 dunbar’snumber, and the bigger projects (eg. Drupal, KDE, GNOME, the Linux Kernel, Fedora, Debian) solve this by dividing into smaller working projects under a larger umbrella.

And yet, our culture supports the formation of companies that are many many times this big.

I’ve written before about the challenges of authenticity in economic activity, and I wonder if having large non-cooperative institutions (companies) is one of the chief sources of in-authenticity is the fact that we can’t remain accountable and connected to the gestalt of the most basic economic unit (the corporation).

I wonder if as we learn from free software and open practices, if cooperative-based business are more likely to become more predominant, or how else our markets and economies will change.

This brings us back to the revenue system in the hacking business model from above. In smaller operations we can imagine that some business opportunities would be viable that wouldn’t be viable in larger operations. Also, because smaller co-ops can specialize more effectively. These factors combine to signify that competition becomes an internal or “vertical” issue rather than an external/horizontal project and in these situations generating revenue becomes easier.

Thoughts?

More to come?

I’ve been reading--and by god I hope by the time I post this, I’m done reading--Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. I read (parts of) these once before, but I was busy adjusting to college at the moment and I didn’t retain a great deal from that experience. In any case, there’s a lot in these stories to pick apart and absorb.

And I enjoy that. I really like science fiction that both tells a good story and contributes to some sort of intellectual conversation that’s bigger than it. Surely all literature has some theoretical conception of itself, but work that unabashedly tussles with relevant knowledge is particularly powerful.

Hell, at one point, a character in Blue Mars meditates on Deleuzian philosophy. My heart goes pitter pattter at the sight of people who are willing to mediate on Deleuze and do a good job at it. (Ironically, or perhaps not, I think a lot of academics don’t quite know what to do with Deleuze.) Anyway…

One of the things that I’ve really enjoyed thinking about while reading Green and Blue Mars is that Robinson does a lot of economic theorizing and imagination. I find this an interesting playground as a lesson from fiction, and also as a productive consideration of the issues I began to talk about in my essay on co-ops, competition, and openness.

So read the book, particularly if you haven’t or if you’re interested in thinking about economic systems and potentials, but the current economy is… boggling.

Robinson posits (a martian) system where land is collectively owned, where projects (research, farming, construction) are undertaken by ~100-person co-ops that workers have to buy-into (with money earned during internships), with everything overseen by a Judaical system that makes judgments on mostly with regards to environmental impact.

My father, upon reading this, made the very apt judgment that, the key here is that--on Mars--there’s no countryside, and that farming (because it’s attached to cities because of the Atmosphere issue). While this is a vast oversimplification--of course--he’s right: new age hacker-type economic models need to consider “industries” like materials engineering and food production more than they currently do.

We have a lot of thinking to do.

Sorry for the puny title. I was thinking about the value of writing, and of “literature,” in our world. Lets call it another post in my sporadic ongoing series of amateur theoretical economics posts. Or something.

The overriding theme of this series has centered on thinking about ways to build business models in a way that represents an authentic (and sustainable) concept of the generation of wealth. Basically, to recognize that wealth is created through the exchange of goods and services which themselves have physical costs, rather than through the exchange of money. Business models which are primarily profitable because they’re designed to cause money to pass through someones hands (who can charge interest on it,) seem flawed from beginning to end. Business models that seem to increase wealth without creating something or doing something in the world, seem fraught with problems.

So then, writing.

Writing is, I thing (inspite/because of my obvious bias) something valuable, and something that has worth, but I don’t think the source of its worth is particularly clear. A lot of literary types are convinced of writing’s power to effect change in the world. Aside from rhetoric (essays, etc.), fiction is a powerful vehicle for cultural critique, and for stimulating thought and wonder in any of a number of areas. Writing provides groups of people with shared experience (“Did you read that book? What did you think?”) and which is certainly socially productive.

But that’s not business, or at least that doesn’t suggest some sort of sustainable business model. Long term social value doesn’t translate into a publishing industry that can sustainably fund the efforts/lives of writers. In a larger frame of reference, we should be able to fund and support the lives and efforts of artists without much trouble. In a sustainable way.

I’ve been thinking about trying to tie some sort of notion of sustainability into this evolving economic theory. In one respect economies which value worth, are necessarily sustainable. On the other hand, I totally recognize the logical inconsistencies with saying “art has abstract worth, so we should value it; investment banking has abstract worth, so we should abandon it.”

Also in this nexus of ideas, I’ve been playing with another concept (in a story, of course) regarding how much (and what kind) of work is required to keep a society fed/clothed/healthy decreases with regards to effort and time. Technology is a powerful thing, and it means, fewer people have to farm (per acre) to grow enough food to feed everyone, better/more efficient refrigeration means less food gets wasted. Better shipping technology means we can centralize tasks. All this filters into “less energy spent on survival” and thus more energy spent on more… abstract… endeavors. Supporting writers, hell supporting everyone, is an increasingly logistical problem.

I’m not sure that this translates, very well, into some understanding of busiess models for folks who do work in more “abstract” markets. I do know, (and have talked at some length here) several things about the business model for writers today: It turns out that bloggers are most successful (it seems) when their “blog” functions as advertising for “actual” work in some other arenas. That’s not a bad thing, and really I think “real writers” have a similar gig. From everything I can gather, “Authors” make money from speaking engagements, book signings, academic contracts, and the like. Just as a blog serves to create a market; a book contract serves to create authority. The business model works for a certain class of writing people, but I don’t know how generalizable or future looking this might be.

And maybe that’s part of the worth of fiction, of writing in general, and of my work in general: if we have any chance to explore these sorts of ideas, theories, and potentials, it’s going to be with the help of researchers who write about their findings, essayists who synthesize information in novel ways, and the fiction/literary writers who explore the implications and possibilities.

Onward and Upward!

Before I started to write this article I heard two pieces of news. First, that the economy of Latvia had failed as part of the ongoing depression. Second, that the American Government was going to provide subsidies to hedge funds (!) to promote a revival of the financial services industry. The mind boggles, to very different degrees at both of these stories. Like this whole depression, it seems clear that the core issue is that economies based on inauthentic exchange of value are prone to failure: the act of moving money from hither to thither doesn’t create value, even though paper values rise. That’s a bubble.

There are a lot of these, of course, the bubble under my lens today is the advertising bubble.

It seems to me that advertising, is really minimally effective, or accidentally effective at any rate. Our world is submerged in advertising, and yet we spend a great deal of time ignoring it: we use DVRs to skip commercials, we install ad-blocking plug-ins on our web-browsers, we instinctively tune out advertisements and have grown so acclimated to the presence of advertising that we ignore ads. If advertising is effective it is only effective incidentally.

And yet, we’ve built (albeit faltering) economies around advertising. The first dot-com burst was due largely to the fact that advertising revenue couldn’t support dot-com business model. The Web-2.0 bubble hasn’t been entirely advertising driven, but that’s a huge part of the equation (eg. google), and particularly for content (rather than service) driven websites.

The thing is that advertising seems like a great way to support the content industry (such as it is): we have practices to separate it from editorial content, it provides a revenue stream, it’s easily integrated into our designs, we know how to buy and sell it. But because it doesn’t really work (at anything beyond generally raising the profile of a logo, possibly), and advertising money dries up when the economy dries up: so it’s not exactly a robust business model.

The problem, is that there’s not a lot of good models for content-based services to operate under. Subscriptions don’t often work because the threshold to commitment is high, and unless you already have an audience, it’s hard to convince people to pay subscription fees. Micropayments, and tip jars where you expect a lot of people to give a very little in support of your site, often suffer from the same problems as subscription models in practice.

The solution?

Well there isn’t one, exactly, so I’m really excited to see what happens in the next couple of years. My gut instinct is that the following two factors are important:

1. Content on the Internet should be a hook into some other revenue generating scheme. Consult, coach, be an academic, publish books, sell relevant stuff, and so forth. This works, it can certainly be overdone, or done poorly, but blogging is a great way to prove to the world (and yourself) that you know what you’re talking about, and that you’re an interesting, creative, and committed thinker and worker, worthy of their investment in other contexts.

2. There should be less content on the Internet. Part of the problem is that since everyone can have their own website, in most cases everyone does, and while this is great for the democracy of the web, it means that there’s way more competition (for eyeballs, for advertising money) than there needs to be. The end result is that audience is way too divided. The solution: group blogs and more curated content. It’s still possible for people to present individual streams of content, and use personal sites for profiles, but in the age of the niche and the post-advertising age, working in groups is the way. I’m convinced.

More thoughts on this, particularly the second point to follow, of course.

Onward and Outward!