Tonight I heard at the last minute about a lecture that Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing was giving here in Melbourne (thanks to a ProBlogger reader for letting me know about it)
His topic:
‘Offering a remarkable global perspective on the future, Cory will discuss his view that technologies which seek to restrict the copying and use of digital works suppress creativity and treat honest users like crooks. The session will cover the tension between corporate imperatives and end-user experience, the current state of Digital Rights Management, online book publishing and more.’
The focus wasn’t directly about blogging and the written media but he’s an interesting guy and it was well worth the $15 to go along and hear him present.
Perhaps the quote of the evening (or at least the one that connected with some of my own thinking over the past few months) was along the lines of:
‘Content isn’t King – Conversation is King’
Cory is also presenting tomorrow night in Sydney.
Nice to read your summary thoughts in a posting.
Great tip but I’m on the other side of the globe.
‘Content isn’t King – Conversation is King’
hmm.. but how long can we carry on the conversation without good content. And isn’t successful blogging all about have solid content?
Like the quote. So simple yet so true.
“Cory will discuss his view that technologies which seek to restrict the copying and use of digital works suppress creativity and treat honest users like crooks”
It’s dificult to comment on that as it isn’t a direct quote, quote, but my immediate reaction, is shaking head/head in hands, no no no!
The difference between an honest user and a thief can be a thousand shades of grey, but as a site which invests considerable sums of money in generating original content, content which is then made available (for free) on our site, there seem to be an awful lot of thieves in this world!
It is pretty depressing dealing with bloggers who continually steal our town maps (for example) and won’t credit the original source — all we require is a link back displayed under the map — yet for many, that is way too much to ask. (This problem isn’t restricted to bloggers, but as this is a bloggers site, I’m using them as an example).
Of course there are also users who abide by our conditions, who ask first (we almost always say yes) and add a link-back, but they’re certainly in the minority.
In one way Cory is restricting the access to his works by charging $15 a head — perhaps he should talk for free so all his listeners can use his intellectual property to bolster creativity…
to be fair on Cory – the $15 per head thing is probably more about the expense of the venue that he was speaking at.
Also he was largely talking about DRM in the music industry and not the writen form.
I agree that it’s depressing though when it comes to people who are either too lazy or greedy to acknowledge sources – it’s quite disallusioning.
Wel, he’s speaking for free tonight in Sydney so I will be there to steal his intellectual propeerty! ;)
[…] Darren […]
Conversation, not Content, is king? Does this mean conversation-rich online discussion boards are outperforming comment-less blogs/content sites?
My favourite quote was in the context that if the RIAA were in court with each individual rather than the class actions.
DoS of the Judicial System
“Content isn’t King – Conversation is King” didn’t Robert Scoble once say that? Is Cory recycling phrases like a human splogger? ;)
His books are AWSOME!
very great topic to be discussed …more about content…..I think good idea