Happy belated birthday...

... to finagler, who let the information slip in a post yesterday.

The publishing revolution

Here's an article in Newsweek (from Debbie Ridpath Ohi, who gets a small mention in the antepenultimate paragraph) talking about the rise of self-publishing on the Web for musicians, artists, and writers. They don't mention software writers, but we've been doing it since before the web existed.

What's new is that the mainstream media are starting to notice, and it scares the heck out of them. For all the screams of "piracy!", what's really at stake here is their business model: nobody needs the big middlemen anymore, not for things like books and CDs. Big-budget items like movies, high-end computer games, and grand opera still need a producer to front a lot of cash, but even there the prime-time advertising and distribution are becoming less important. For every movie that makes it big on its first weekend there are many that might as well go straight to DVD. Some of them do, and that trend is only going to increase. Other big projects can be done collaboratively now. Look at Linux.

(I was going to have some clever conclusion here, but I've had so many interruptions over the last hour or so that my concentration is blown, and I need to get to the bank and then to work. More tomorrow, perhaps.)