On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 7:07 AM, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.comwrote:
On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Carcharoth wrote:
On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 3:51 PM, Carcharoth <
carcharothwp@googlemail.com> wrote:
Anyone else feel that Mr. Murdoch's little list beginning "1. Trash Google rather than actually noindex News Corp's pages" has Wikipedia as alternate new source somewhere on it?
That's a bit too cryptic for me. I know a little about Murdoch and his stable of media publications, but not sure what the tie-up is with Google and Wikipedia.
Mr. Murdoch wants to shift to a paid access model for online the online versions of his news holdings. He's negotiating a deal with Microsoft's search engine toward that purpose.
It's hard to understand the conjecture that Wikipedia ties in with those plans. If anything, Wikipedia's habit of referencing historic news articles would help Mr. Murdoch's bottom line because it sends traffic to old articles, which can generate advertising revenue from old news that would otherwise be valueless.
If he's right about paid access being the most profitable model, then his self interest would be best served by fencing new content within a paid access only for a brief time: a week at most. By that time it becomes old news and there's more money to be made through advertising. Successive release to different venues is standard practice within the entertainment industry: a film starts with theatrical release, and once that exhausts itself it goes to cable, DVD and network television in descending order of profitability.
If this is his plan and it becomes the news industry standard then it could make breaking news less burdensome upon Wikipedia's administrators: fewer people will read the news immediately and edit Wikipedia. Of course Wikipedia might also be the wrench in his plans because he can't prevent his readers from updating Wikipedia, significant news readership would shift to Wikipedia, and we have no reason to stop being a free venue. Perhaps that was Charles's intended inference?
-Durova