The self-defeating nature of hiding content

Doc Searls has a great piece on printwashing (with followups here, here and here). Printwashing describes what many publications do on the web by hiding old stories in for-pay archives.

It seems wrongheaded to be in a business of generating content and then restricting access. This is the closed source model, where the content is the commodity to be bought and sold instead of the service of delivering the content. The problem with this approach for publications is the value of a publication is based on its reputation. The reputation is built on the content provided. If the content becomes highly restricted, reputation will diminish over time, making the content less desirable and further reducing reputation. Nice vicious cycle.

This effect is starting to be seen on search engines like Google. Since Google can't find the content in the restricted archives, other sources of content are becoming more prominent. This is what is creating the furor over blogs. Bloggers write about many things, including current events. And Google's web crawler finds blog content, making it seem like blogs are unfairly represented. Since the closed content isn't really on the web, it is completely appropriate to be excluded. These commercial content-makers are finding themselves threatened by the free-wheeling world of blogging and yet the problem is of their own making.

As Dave Winer put it, If you want to be in Google, you gotta be on the Web. It's pretty simple.

kherr @ 23:46 CDT | link | general