One of the most tiresome group of people you encounter when you write a weekly column is the “suggesters”.
Throughout the week, my inbox receives a steady flow of emails; from friends, from colleagues, but mostly from total strangers – all containing useful links to stories they “assume I’ve seen”. And always with the same suggestion: “you should write about this in your column!”.
Worse than the suggesters are the “trusters”. They’re even more irritating because of their belief that they wield some kind of editorial influence. “Trust you’ll be writing about this in your column this week. Can’t wait to hear your take on it!” they say, blithely assuming that their lack of patience will ultimately be rewarded. Some of them even add a ‘LOL’ to further underline what total and utter wankers they are.
In truth, it rarely pays to indulge the recommenders or the trusters. If a subject has blipped across their radar then chances are, by the time my weekly deadline has come around, it will have been done to death by other bloggers and columnists. By Saturday even the person who ‘couldn’t wait’ to hear my take on a subject will be utterly bored with it.
The perfect example of this is Rupert Murdoch’s “threat” to remove News Corp content from Google, and his “negotiations” with Microsoft to make articles from The Wall Street Journal and the rest “only available on Bing”. It’s no exaggeration to say that the entire fucking universe has emailed me to say how much they’re looking forward to hearing my opinion on the prospect.
Please excuse us for reading and being interested in your collumn
Yeah, no kidding. It must suck to have people care about your opinion on things… and tell you as much. Or those annoying people that try to send you a heads-up?
Glad I’ve never tried to help you, I’d have been called out for it.
O.K. I will talk about Rupert and the rest….Rupert seems to be saying that the content of the companies that he owns has a value, and that this can be plainly seen by the amount of revenue that google generates off of his content. I think that Rupert does have a point; the content of the companies that he owns has a value and google does generate some revenues from this content.
I think that most of the tech media has missed the bigger point of all of this; and that is that Rupert’s content does have value and that other companies namely google use his content to generate revenue that they do not share with the content owner. Rupert says that because of this he is willing to not allow google to have his content unless they share the revenue with him. Why do we treat user generated content differently ?
Clearly it has value. Facebook, Twiiter and Myspace generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from user generated content. The proof and facts are all their to prove the point that user generated content has value; in fact enough value to push Facebook and Twiiters valuation into the billions. Why is it o.k. for Rupert to think that google should pay him a share of the revenue that they generate from his valuable content and not o.k. for users that contribute content that has value and generates revenue not to also ask for and be paid a share of the revenue that they have helped to generate ? There should be no separate standard in place here. As they say, what is good for the goose is good for the gander…So Rupert and Mark…fair is fair right ? Take out your check books and start paying members the revenue that they deserve for creating millions in revenue and value for you and your companies…
You seem to treat your readers with disrespect.
You should be honoured that people seek your opinion.
hear – hear! what rubbish.