Given the amount of press that Ye Olde Napster seems to dredge up for its sins, one would thing more attention might be paid to how hyperactively reshared mass media has become. There are still authoritative sources of high quality news, but more and more I’m realizing that the “online experience” of that news might actually be less fulfilling than the “dead tree product”.

After all, it may a pain to dispose of the newspaper, but:

1. It can’t be ignored(or more accurately, ignore it for a few days and it piles up, reminding you of your own wastefulness).
2. It can’t be unpublished, and it *will* be archived.
3. It’s much easier on your eyes(if not your arms), meaning you read more.
4. There’s an actual profit model. (sigh)

That being said, there are some truly unique things that the net really does enable. Usually, the more domain specific a given piece of work is, the harder it is to acquire(since the generalized stores won’t waste space on what appeals to very few). The net alleviates that, but suffers a different problem: Due to the lack of a profit model, after a certain point, it’s all too easy for a site to simply not scale to large amounts of traffic and to have no way of improving scalability. This was the problem the absolutely incredible ZZZ Online faced, after being temporarily(but repeatedly) raised from a slightly obscure but technically unparalleled journal of upcoming technologies to a “geek mass market” Slashdot destination. They lost their provider as a result of the crushing load–an embarassment of riches, if anyone was actually getting rich!

Honestly, there’s a decent question of whether traditional unicast methodologies(even when multiplied by highly distributed middlemen) actually can or should be made to scale to broadcast-sized audiences. P2P will inevitably be sold to the few remaining VC’s with money to burn as the solution to these problems, and indeed leveraging network locality of one’s clients while maintaining stream integrity is very likely to be an effective strategy…at least until high speed upload at the client side becomes buried by provider centralization and possibly legal challenges(i.e. “why would anyone want to send data that they didn’t steal from us?”).

In the end, it’s going to be Yet Another Battle, with the “Consumer Movement” probably winning more converts from the “Napster Constituen cy” than they ever imagined.