Mass Amateurization
Via Clay Shirky:
Can someone make money by blogs? Clay Shirky in his article says that blogs essentially destroys the intrinsic and extrinsic values of Print Publishing.
Intrinsic -
It takes real work to publish anything in print, and more work to store, ship, and sell it. Because the up-front costs are large, and because each additional copy generates some additional cost, the number of potential publishers is limited to organizations prepared to support these costs. (These are barriers to entry.) And since it’s most efficient to distribute those costs over the widest possible audience, big publishers will outperform little ones. (These are economies of scale.) The cost of print insures that there will be a small number of publishers, and of those, the big ones will have a disproportionately large market share.
Weblogs destroy this intrinsic value, because they are a platform for the unlimited reproduction and distribution of the written word, for a low and fixed cost. No barriers to entry, no economies of scale, no limits on supply.
_Print publishing also creates extrinsic value, as an indicator of quality - _Weblogs destroy this extrinsic value as well. Print publishing acts as a filter, weblogs do not. Whatever you want to offer the world – a draft of your novel, your thoughts on the war, your shopping list – you get to do it, and any filtering happens after the fact, through mechanisms like blogdex and Google. Publishing your writing in a weblog creates none of the imprimatur of having it published in print.