I may live to regret this

[slowfox]

Following up on the washing machine stuff, I kinda took it apart last night - not hugely, mind, but after some subtle hints on the interwebz, I did manage to find the filter - hidden beyond the wit of any thief, naturally, and pulled it out and cleaned it. Not that it seemed to need it much. Hmm.

Anyway, the dry run (no oxymoronic pun intended) seemed to remain dry, so am going to risk running a medium-ish load this evening and see what transpires.

As keen scholars of these pages will recall, I tend to load up on podcasts for dog walking (and the commute to work). Principally these are sourced from The Beeb, Teh Grauniad and TWiT. I've also started re-listening to Dan Carlin's Common Sense, which I'm finding a compelling listen, even if it is mostly concerned with US politics from a domestic perspective.

Anyway, even though TWiT and Common Sense are both available free, I pay a monthly subscription to each, because I think they're well produced, entertaining and worth supporting. Something similar, indeed, to the rationale that prompted me to initially support LiveJournal, Back In The Day™, and, currently, that ensures that I have a paid account here.

I think we're approaching a difficult point with the web - there's an expectation that so much of the content we access should be free (to the user), but obviously it costs money to create and host it all. Now, DW adopts the Freemium model for funding, relying on the assumption that the dedicated users who pay for a paid account will be sufficient to fund the architecture to host the entire community. Other places rely on advertising and marketing, but with an increasingly ad-aware/ad-immune userbase, I do wonder if present advertising rates can be sustained. If not, then funding from advertisers must surely drop, which, in turn, means that what can be provided on the basis of ad-funding must also drop.

Comments

[linaelyn]

Interesting thinky-thoughts on the nature of free/paid webcontent. I think there will be additional leanings toward the "paid by those who can afford it" model, but that may simply be my wishful-thinking socialist leanings? A decent approach for most humans of good will, at any rate.

I've recently been converted to the joys of podcast listening, myself. Your blatant enjoyment of the art form (and the enjoyment of several other friends) was a factor, there; the U.S.ian National Public Radio is a decent source, but what really sold me was the Sex is Fun podcast via iTunes. (tell me you're surprised. HA!) It's entertaining, but rather uneven. It gets better in later shows.

Best of luck with the washer. We've had flooding issues of our own in years past, when our machine clogged and was very-nearly-self-repaired.

I am eager to be considered one of the keen scholars of these pages.

[slowfox]

I actually added a specific parenthetical comment to you in the podcast section to exhort you to go and check out Dan Carlin's Common Sense (which is on iTunes), but then redacted it because it seemed... a bit impolite to post an explicit instruction before we'd actually engaged in conversation about the entry.

So instead I can now, with complete justification, say that when I mentioned the Dan Carlin, I was absolutely hoping that you, in particular, would see the link and check it out. Non-partisan politics is how he describes things, and although I had real issues with his health-care discussion, he's definitely thought provoking, and eminently listenable.

Sex is Fun? Will indeed check out :-)

[yvi]

*nods*

I also think this ties in neatly with my theory on how so very few people realize what it actually entails to really do work with computers. As evidenced by the fact that the professor I work for seem to think web design can happen in the space of a week (after all he doesn't want something complicated. so why do companies charge hundreds of Euros for it then???) or my boyfriend's professors thinks searching for something in a whole genome can't take that much time (I have been on a task like that for days now). They are at a point where everything *they* do doesn't take longer than a few seconds on a computer and so the general thinking seems to turn away form "computers are so hard to use" to "computers may be hard to use for me, but surely experts must be able to solve anything in a matter of hours".

I was going somewhere with this, I think. Oh yes, free websites and stuff. For example, there is a lot of people work and sever work in Dreamwidth. Of course, an individual user uploading ten icons more doesn't make a difference in cost. Thousands of people doing so will cost quite a bit. Implementing editing of picture keywords (and then using the new keyowrds and the correct images) sounds like an easy task. The patch is rather non-trivial, though: http://bugs.dwscoalition.org/attachment.cgi?id=2181 Getting everything for free on the web because it's "not real" is an illusion.

[slowfox]

Well, certainly there's the programming time, but there's also the pure infrastructre costs too (server hardware, electricity costs etc).

I think I remember reading somewhere that google's electricity bill was more expensive than their wage bill, which is simply astonishing...

Anyway, all of this costs money, and there has to be a point where the website operator has to determine exactly how what they're offering is to be funded.