Re: ::scr Paying for It

[Simon Wistow <simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, May 02, 2002 at 12:17:00PM +0100, Alaric Snell said:
> I'd do this by making the URLs of all the articles and so on contain large 
> randomish numbers (so they can't be guessed), but to only show the navigation 
> menus if the viewer has a valid logon cookie.
> 
> Then anyone can see the URL, but only registered people can *find* those URLs 
> in the first place.

Oooh cunning.
 
> > So you say "hey, you'd really like this article on salon. I've given
> > you a sublogin. My username is "muttley", and you can use "hitherto"
> > and the password "excellent". It'll let you in for a couple of days.
> 
> That'd be such a pain to do, and does not account for posting to mailing 
> lists :-)


But both of thoses method prevent me from searching out new material -
if everything's behind passworded portals then I'm not going to be able
to search for it.

People keep trying to map the web to physical media but that defeats the
point. The web is not just some sort of electronic document store that
allows get at a vast quantity of information quickly. It's more than
that. 

As I've said before, I think we've fucked it, fumbled the ball, dropped
a clanger, screwed it all over - we have a paradox.

Good sites gets lots of hits. Hits cost money. So they start charging.
Then they just become electronic magazines pretty much nullifying their
point because all they are is just an online document store like the
academic journal archives you can subscribe to.

We want the web to be accessible to everyone but by doing so we force a
situation where all that was special about the web isn't there anymore.