This blog (and its few brilliant pieces of original writing) notwithstanding, I'm constantly amazed by the idea that online content should be provided for free. The editor of Wired magazine reckons content should be totally gratis mahala, and most publishers I've worked for have treated orignal online writing as a nice added bonus. (Certainly not anything you as a professional writer are going to be paid anything extra for.) I don't understand that - and I find that generally, you get what you pay for. (Like my Dad probably said: If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.)
So three cheers and a hip-hip-hooray to the otherwise completely evil and nefarious Rupert Murdoch. The Daily Beast has the story:
"Railing against “content kleptomaniacs” like Google, Microsoft, and Ask.com—which effectively syndicate News Corp. content without paying—Murdoch even suggested he might put up walls that prevent the stories in his papers from appearing in Google searches at all.
Click here to find out more!
That’s right: Instead of rigging the system to achieve higher rankings in search returns, Murdoch is contemplating pulling his content from Google searches altogether—a simple tweak that Google says is available to every Web site."
The full story is available here. For free, of course...