Paul Ford:
I sometimes chat with people in the book- and magazine-publishing industries. They complain to me about the web. They worry about what is being lost. […]
The web, they are a little proud to admit, confuses them. They say: “We gave away all those short stories on our website but it sold no books.” Or: “We built a promo site for our famous author who does the crime novels and it was just a total boondoggle with no traffic.” Or: “The magazine can’t get enough pageviews, even after we hired the famous blogger. Now management wants to make people pay for access.”
“Look,” I say, “maybe you’re doing it wrong.”
“But,” they say, “we tweet.”
That’s when I tell them about the fundamental question of the web.