Feb 8 - Print vs Digital

The different costs that arise between print media and digital media are astounding and varied. the first one, obviously, is the literal cost - imagine you had to subscribe to a magazine for every blog you read, or buy a newspaper to read an article. The amount of media you consume would instantly collapse. If each thing cost more than they do now, the benefit would be reduced considerably.

The cause of this is the cost of production, just like with the costs of books before Gutenberg's invention. Every copy of a magazine has to be written, arranged, printed, and shipped all over the country. There are hundreds of people involved with this, not counting the actual shipping. No wonder those things cost three bucks at newstands! Newspapers are the same way - only it's every night that it happens.

So when you work in a medium that has incredibly small costs of production, like this blog, you end up with a huge amount of content. Since the only thing I'm spending is my time, there's no huge financial reason that I shouldn't produce every minute of the day. So how do you sift through this?

Thankfully, a major feature of the internet is its social aspects. If it weren't for the retweet feature on twitter, we'd only ever follow people we know. If it weren't for aggregator sites linking to informative blogs, we'd never read those. And if we never read those first posts, how are we supposed to visit a site enough for it to make any money? Where would we be then?