Great post by Doc Searls on the future of free and paid content. Doc muses on the evolution of paid content content sites, especially in light of the rumored Google crawl of premium content, versus the “live web”, which gets dominated by advertising, link spam, and automated link sites that try to pay for themselves via Google Adsense. (It’s this last problem that Doc refers to as a cancer, which he’s named Splogonoma.) Doc sees a dark future for the “live web” unless the big guys (Google, Yahoo! etc.) who have tools for fighting this stuff contribute some of what they know, perhaps via an open source project, to be used by the rest of us. Thought provoking. Very much on point with my recent struggle to understand how O’Reilly got snared by search engine spam.
