Dan G

When terrible events happen how the news broke to the world can often be traced in the history of the Wikinews article.

It's so sad to see the true horror become apparent.

One of my favourite blogs - IAG, a brilliant airliner and airline news blog - has retreated behind a paywall; I mourn the site's forthcoming death.

The site's owners - two "old media" types - did some market research before making this decision, where they discovered that only 20% of their current readership would consider paying to access their content. The owners believe that even with just 20% of their readers following them behind their paywall they'll make more money than they currently do with advertising.

This is probably true (except I doubt the take-up will be as high as 20%, people saying they'll pay is one thing in a survey but actually paying up is another), but represents a classic example of going for small short-term gains at the exspense of greater profits in the longer term. Now, their content will rapidly age out of search engines and people will stop linking to their content as no-one can read it - so no-one will find their site anymore. At the same time existing subscribers will drift away - people unsubscribe from sites all the time for a million different reasons. So their (small) paying readership will slowly dwindle to nothing, and they'll go out of business.

If the owners had been smart they'd have adopted the tactics used by all other successful blogs out there. They would have swept away huge mess of advertising that was plastered over their site and used a few relevant, well-chosen, and well-placed adverts, such as those from Federated Media and Text Link Ads. (They could also have used Feedburner's RSS feed adverts.) That would have greatly increased their existing ad revenue.

Then they would have simply carried on as they were - producing great content and growing their audience. Eventually their ad revenues would have far exceeded what they'll ever hope to make with a paywall.

But that's not what they did, so IAG is disappearing from the web. A shame.

Addendum It only took a few minutes of searching to find replacement blog with all the content IAG had.

Here's a cracking comment left on Scoble's blog: "old" companies - big ones - are beginning to fight hard against new Internet companies. A great insight.

Myspace blocking Photobucket's video-hosting is a crazy example of this. They probably won't lose existing users who are locked into large existing networks, but they sure as hell aren't enticing new ones. Where's the growth model there?

A rare and beautiful thing. In the World of Slashdot Vista is "defective by design" and never works for uses. (Note that this +5 comment still recieved a negative mod as "flamebait"!)

In the real world the new OS is selling slowly but steadily and by all other accounts is actually working jus' fine.

An excellent demonstration via PodTech of how Windows Presentation Foundation can be used to produce slicker and much more engaging interfaces for web 2.0 services. The company is thirteen23.

Don't forget that to run WPF apps you only need .NET 3.0 - not Vista. Any Windows XP computer can run these apps. I tried thirteen23's Flickr Nostalgia app on my four-year-old laptop and it ran a treat.

Can Apollo compete with this? I'd like to see a demo that is as compelling. Apollo has being cross-platform in its favour, but with the dominance of Windows in the market is that important? I think not - companies code for the biggest market, and that's Windows.

Like everyone else, the blogosphere has a short attention span and this incident will soon slip from the collective short term memory to the long term memory of blog archives.

This marks that transition for this blog here. As well, this is a time to learn. My position, clear from the start, is zero tolerance. People who make or facilitate misogynistic or other hateful posts must not be tolerated - they should be isolated and, if possible, deleted (I'm looking at you - everyone on Digg, those with mod points on Slashdot, everyone who has a blog with comments).

What are other people saying?

Well, we've already seen Kathy Sierra and Chris Locke's statements (note, not joint statements). But let's not forget that this went well beyond the two of them.

Here's Scoble. He states it's a strain to moderate comments on his blog and considered closing the comments - as many other bloggers have. That would be a shame - what conversation would be left? And it would be letting the bullies win, to boot. Scoble then goes on to make a good point that attack/hate blogs are frequently attention seeking (hell I'd never heard of Chris Locke before).

Then he makes an odd statement: "Lots of bloggers hate them [attacks], but know they better not speak out against them. Kathy, last week, got MORE attacks AFTER she wrote that post than before. So, bloggers, if they are in this for the long haul, learn they should keep their mouths shut." What's that about? Give in to these idiots? Not a chance.

Scoble finishes by saying that there's not much we can do. Hell yeah there is, hound these idiots off the face of the internet, that's what we can do. Bullies don't like it when their victims stand up to them. Just watch Locke crawling now.

A few other posts caught my eye. Sessum is tired of people pointing out that she supported Meankids. Well, she should have thought about that before being an idiot. You thought racist, misogynistic crap was good? And let's not pretend that stuff only came out later in the blog's life - check the search engine caches, it was like that from the start.

Finally, I like Tara Hunt's thoughts on these people's motivation. I couldn't agree more.

That's it. Time to move on.

But never forget.

As promised, here it is.

Be warned though, at times it's so simplistic and at times so corny it's almost funny. Locke features for about five seconds.

All in all, pretty worthless.

Kathy Sierra and Chris Locke have made statements about the affair, with introductory posts on their blogs - Sierra's and Locke's (Locke is using his "Rageboy" ID).

One thing I note is that Locke still claims that he deleted unclebobism himself. So why did wordpress.com bother to put up "this blog breaks our terms of service" notices on a blog that had already "been deleted"? Draw your own conclusions.

Locke's post also dissolves into a standard "protect free speech" post. Writing from a country (the UK) where hate speech is illegal and our society is considerably better for it, I cannot agree.

Sierra and Locke also appeared on CNN today. If I can find a clip I'll post it here.

My own position on the matter remains unchanged. I believe people involved in pathetic hate-blogs like meankids and unclebobism do not deserve to be included in the Conversation. Furthermore, and importantly, comments posted on blogs that are about nothing but the sexualisation of females should be deleted on sight.

Well, Scoble broke his week-long no-blogging protest to post an April Fool's joke.

Not even going to bother to link.