Web publishing costs

Trawling through some of the American press to see what is being said about the so-called DOPA legislation just passed by the US House of Representatives (comment to come), but happened across the final column of Lesley Walker, Technology Correspondent for the Washington Post. As is customary in final columns, she was musing about all that had passed her way in the 8 years since she began writing it. Some interesting memories, but the one point that stood out for me is her comment that many of the social networking sites (she points to MySpace and YouTube in particular) that have expanded massively in the last year are at least partly a result of something she did not anticipate, namely that Internet publishing costs have fallen dramatically just as Web software has grown more powerful. It would seem a significant conjunction of trends. She says that, "Some estimate that the cost of launching a Web business today is barely 20 percent what it was in 1998. Forget the nutty ideas. Falling costs will turbo-charge personal publishing even more by letting the good ones reach the Web quickly." Forget the nutty ideas, indeed, but then maybe some ideas that were nutty in the late 90s are not so nutty now. Time to dust off all those crazy proposals you had to get in on the dot-com boom? Just wish I had some! Or even one!

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© John Connell
The views expressed in this weblog are entirely my own and are not intended to reflect the views of any other individuals or organizations. All sources will be fully acknowledged.