The End of "The End Of The Free"

You may have read, "the end of free is near" for content on the web. There is even a high profile blog devoted to it. But I beg to differ. Consider this:

The number of amatuer sites and blogs far outweighs the number of heavyweights and big media content providers. In fact the amount of quality content since the wide-spread emergence of blogs is so great, that the actual content provided by the big players is negligible by comparison. But the story goes, that these higher quality writers need to make a living. Sure, I'm not arguing that, but there are just as many high quality writers who have their own blogs who make money doing something else for their primary income. And when you take the advent of smart news aggretators like Amphetadesk, it only makes the task of getting the news you need that much easier. When a site starts charging for content, the Net effect will treat such charged content as censorship and route around it.

So what is my prediction? I'm predicting the opposite of other more prominent techno-pundits: 2003 will be the year of the end of "the end of free". Instead we are going to see a massive proliferation of amateur writing permeate the net in unprecendented ways. And with increasingly sophisticated filtering and search tools, we will be able to keep up with the best of the best based on our own web-of-trust and customized reputation systems. I also expect that the best writers will be able to get payed for their work through pay-pal and other voluntary tipping mechanisms. I know of several writers who have managed to get some money from their very kind and loyal readers.