Cuteness and Serendipity

The pile of unread Atlantic Monthly magazines on my coffee table keeps growing. For some reason, there is always something else that requires my attention. At my in laws' house, I managed to read two issues. Go figure.

Did you read James Fallows' Panda Land article? See the slide show.

The on-line only slide show led me to look at the on-line version of the article which led me to Fallows' blog which led me to Kevin Kelly's essay, Better than Free, about possible business models for giving away information for free.

Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free.
[snip]
When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

Instead of despair, he wrote up 8 models for making a living off of creating free quality content. Perhaps you will read his ideas and come up with more.

Speaking of that, have you read James Fallows' books, Breaking The News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy and More Like Us?

Iris wants to start her own website (really an on-line weekly magazine) and buy her own domain. I have been trying to explain ICANN, URLs, domain registries and web hosting to her. Does anyone know of a primer written at a pre-teen or teen level?

We played around with creating html with Microsoft word, but it proved to be too clunky for her. Please leave a comment if you have created a web page with a child with your lessons learned. Thanks.