On not being paid
I'm sadly not able to go to Aspen this week, but Gigi Sohn is there now. Reporting in her inimitable style, she says:
[P]erhaps [Michael Eisner's] most ridiculous shot of the day was at co-panelist Arianna Huffington, publisher of the Huffington Post.
Eisner criticized Huffington for a business model that does not pay its
contributing bloggers. If people just give away their blog posts to the
Huffpo, they will be relegated to working on an assembly line just to pay their bills, he said.
Gigi points out, rightly, that there are a lot of reasons people blog that have nothing to do with money. Recognition, influence, impact, conversational participation in the online world - there are many good motivations to write. It may be true for most bloggers that there's no immediate business model, but there are indirect informational effects of writing a blog that can support a satisfying and moderately remunerative life.
Here, take my blog - it's free. And tomorrow I'll go back to CALEA (bet you can't wait).
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What of course is not widely reported is that the annual Aspen
meat-space meetings seem to have a strange impact on the
next year's ICANN agendas. Note that Esther Dyson is there, of
course. Someone should pull out that classic photo with Dyson and
Vinton Cerf and Ira Magaziner during the time when “the Clintons”
were last in the whitehouse. ICANN then appeared from the Aspen
mist. People of course denied any connection.
ICANN by the way was only set up to do “Proof of Concept” market
trials. Those are mostly over, and have clearly failed. It should be
no surprise that Vinton Cerf is headed for the door.
Kevin Martin- Chairman, Federal Communications Commission
Viviane Reding- Commissioner for Information Society & Media- Europen Commission
Jonathan Adelstein- Federal Communications Commission
Madeleine Albright- The Albright Group
Esther Dyson- EDventure Holdings
Michael Eisner- The Tornante Company, former Disney CEO
Jordan Greenhall- DivX, Inc.
Arianna Huffington- The Huffington Post
Craig Newmark- craigslist
Deborah Taylor Tate- Federal Communications Commission
Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.- The New York Times
Jon Diamond- ArtistDirect
Reed Hundt- McKinsey & Company, former FCC Chairman
Alberto Ibarguen- John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Mark Nathanson- National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, Charter Communications
Lynda Resnick- Roll International Corporation
Julius Genachowski- Rock Creek Ventures