Alert readers will note that I've moderated my blogging in a concerted effort to focus on a novel I'm writing. Haven't given up the ghost here, but will be picking my battles and serving up more tidbits from my reading, like this from Cory Doctorow:
The interesting bit isn't what it costs to replicate some big, pre-Internet business or project.The interesting bit is what it costs to do something half as well as some big, pre-Internet business or project.
[...]
This is the pattern: doing something x percent as well with less-than-x percent of the resources. A blog may be 10 percent as good at covering the local news as the old, local paper was, but it costs less than 1 percent of what that old local paper cost to put out. A home recording studio and self-promotion may get your album into 30 percent as many hands, but it does so at five percent of what it costs a record label to put out the same recording.
What does this mean? Cheaper experimentation, cheaper failure, broader participation. Which means more diversity, more discovery, more good stuff that could never surface when the startup costs were so high that no one wanted to take any risks.
h/t Hal Davis
