I only said “content creator” because it was a shorter way to say photographer, filmmaker, writer, artist, etc. But I see what you’re saying, nonetheless. Feature film (Tarantino) and music (Timberlake) are solidly established and extremely commercial formats today, so it makes me ask, “What kind of online “content” (meaning interactive slideshows, podcasts, Flash animation, etc) will establish itself as commercially viable?”

ChrisN,

I agree 100% with you in philosophy, but am willing to compromise for the time being. Maybe I’m a sellout but Flickr has facilitated a lot of rewarding sharing (lots of comments, encouraging interactions, networking, etc). I use Creative Commons licenses for everything, and it’s allowed my stuff to travel. Today, I took a couple minutes to count up all the different venues that have opened just from Flickr:

I’ve been published on CNET.co.uk, an online publication at MIT, a student magazine in Sweden, a travel book, an exhibition in Spain, another in New Zealand, a German magazine, four requests to NowPublic.com, two independant documentary films, a non-profit magazine in Washington, a corporate office in Tijuana, and a community publication in New Jersey. My only financial gain was $150 from the corporate office in Tijuana. I got a request from Travel Girl Magazine (commercial publication that didn’t fit my CC license) but they weren’t willing to pay so I said “no.”

Oso,

At the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute arts department, there was talk about migrating away from Final Cut, Protools, etc and to only teach using open source programs. I don’t know how much progress they’ve made in the past few years, but it seemed like an honorable goal. Someone needs to fund a non-profit think tank to solve all these problems

Like I said, I agree with you completely and for the next couple years I’ll be doing all I can to spread the use of open source tools for content creation and production. However, while GIMP, Audacity, and Jahshaka are great, they’re not installed in most internet cafes around the world. I’d like to see open source programmers start moving to the web and thinking offering online image, audio, and video production tools.

ChrisN,

Can you imagine how pissed off the old school del.icio.us and Flickr users are going to be if those sites become Microsoft owned?

Ndesanjo,

Thanks for stopping by. I’m attaching an audio comment to this to see if it works. Sometimes the uploading goes really slow for me too.

I’m at risk of that for my hosting, and have been bitten before, but it has been a fairly seamless transition from backups to new host when that happens.

10 bucks a month

Sorry, that should ready ‘10 bucks a year’.

And when I go to your site I see links to your content on YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv, Flickr, delicious, and Technorati. (not to mention the eight bookmarking services each post links to).

That’s true – but note that a) the links don’t actually point anywhere offsite; they were simply aggregated feeds coming from those services and b) none of them have been updated in quite a while.

It’s relevant to mention here that they are relics from an idea I had wherein I would use all these other services (‘digital neighbours’) to link back / fork to to my own personal site (‘digital home’). All of my flickr posts had a link back to my blog or local photo gallery to “read more”, etc.

This ties in with conversations I’ve been listening to on ‘revolutionary theory’ – I used to think that we could appropriate / utilize the existing web infrastructure (even if it is corporate-controlled) to achieve our goals (in this case, horizontal distribution of software and hardware information resources) instead of ignoring them and/or tearing them down. Lately, I’ve been leaning towards the latter. That’s why I ditched them, and why those links on my site will soon disappear.

We’re a long way off from the horizontal web my friend…

But the fact is, that’s hard to do.

Hmm… and I thought I was the pessimist here. Yeah, you’re right – we are a long way, and it will be hard to do. But was anything ever worth doing quick and easy?

… and unless those those tools are just as easy to use as the services provided by Yahoogle, I don’t think it will happen.

I agree. That’s why I’m so encouraged by projects and ideas like Open Usability, Open Source Web Design, Open Access to digital scholarly resources (in my mind, one of the most critical debates for the future of the entire human race), and emerging open hardware projects like the Open Source Car or OS Hardware. The driving force behind open source software (to which we owe the Internet as we know it today) is starting to be applied to domains like interface usability, graphic design, and hardware. All this should help in the push to make our own “horizontal web” tools to rival Yagle.

Nathan,

As a content creator…

So you ‘create content’? You’re not a producer, or a photographer? When someone asks Quentin Tarantino or Justin Timberlake what they do, do they respond, “I create content”? No, they are ‘directors’ and ‘musicians’.

Yahoo and Google want you to feel like a “content creator”, but the truth is you’re much, much more than that. Don’t sell yourself short.

To have real control over ones personal site, you have recurring payments for domain and hosting.

I can understand that the purpose of real art is never to make money. But if someone somehow has access to the net, I’d wager that they can afford the 5 bucks a month for hosting and 10 bucks a month for a domain name.

As a content creator (video shorts, photography), I’ve made the decision to go for audience by using open licenses on YouTube and Flickr. My purpose in making art isn’t about making money (and usually when it is, it seems to lose its core). Part of it is that the effort it would take to market my own work can’t return any profit (lets take that as a reflection on the art market, not that my stuff sucks).

I think it’s completely reasonable that companies make money for providing services free to users. To have real control over ones personal site, you have recurring payments for domain and hosting. And I don’t generate enough traffic to recoup those costs in sensibly placed google ads. You, on the other hand, probably could.

The interesting part to me is the journalistic side. News makers know they need to get “2.0″ but know one seems to have a proven “how to” list for them, so they’re all taking stabs at it. It seems like news organizations need to figure out how to open the doors to the public, letting them produce/report stories and pay them for it, like freelancing. It would be great to see the huge corporations get that amateurish quality that community stations have, because broadcast audiences like seeing ‘real’ people.

What will this blog look like in 10 years?

In 10 years, will non-trained people be performing journalistic acts with their [ insert name of future personal media device that can broadcast via broadband ] on the side of the road as the first person on-scene of an accident? TV stations would love that footage. Where will those clips go? Will a site collect them and license them? Will the company that manages the [ insert name of device ] create personalized uploads pages and host all the media?