Copyrights are going to kill weblogs as we know them.  Plain and simple.  I didn’t think about it much until I saw Scoble’s post the other day concerning the topic.  I posted my thoughts on the topic here. 

What brings this up today, you ask!?  Well, I read a GREAT post from Joe Wilcox on his Microsoft Monitor blog.  It was a post about the new NewsGator Media Center Edition RSS Reader.  It was a VERY insightful post.  During it he transitioned into a discussion around copyrights somehow; I don’t quite know why.  That’s beside the point…but still ironic.

Why ironic?  Well, I wanted to post Joe’s entry on my blog with my own comments.  According to the Jupitermedia’s policy, I cannot host an internet.com article or other content on my site.  I can only create a text hyperlink from my site to theirs.  I’m not saying that Jupitermedia is wrong here – quite contrary, they have EVERY RIGHT to protect the content they host and to make sure they are properly compensated (in this case via web hits) for display of that content.  Heck, I’d do the same thing if I were a content company.  I would want to defend my company’s assets every chance I got too!  No content – no revenue.  I just think a lot of our ways of protecting individuals’ intellectual property don’t make sense anymore.  They haven’t gone through the same transformation that our ways of sharing that intellectual property have gone through – MP3s, WMA, DVD, CDROM, etc.  Maybe they’ll eventually catch up just in time for them not to be relevant again.

So, go read Joe’s latest post – it’s a great one.  When you’re all done reading that, let me know so that I can post my thoughts and you can read them in the context in which they were intended to be read – Joe’s post.  This is what we’re going to be doing unless we figure out a way to protect content and make it accessible to the “Echo Chamber” without sacrificing either.  I’m not saying just having a link to the site makes the validity of my post any lesser or greater; just that it makes it easier for people to read and, if they choose, to post to their blog and create a sort of “living conversation”.

By the way, Newsgator’s new Media Center Edition Product is amazing.  Not amazing because you can read RSS feeds on your TV; although that does have some “cool factor”.  It’s amazing because of its potential to revolutionize the way we get and share information.  Joe describes in his post that perhaps this is how we’ll share pictures with friends and family in the future.  You’re watching TV, an alert pops up and you read that your family’s photo-based RSS feed has a new update.  You click, the TV is paused and then you are browsing some cute baby pictures or shots from a sunny vacation retreat. 

Four years ago, I saw BillG talk about .NET and how it was going to change everything.  He showed the cute little video of the grandparents receiving photos from the grandkids on the TV and uploading them to an electronic picture frame.  I saw that and thought, “How stupid is that…it doesn’t properly communicate what ‘.NET’ is.  It’s a complete fake and people will see right through it as ‘vaporware’.”  I was right.  We finally figured out, though, how to make .NET make sense (at least I think so) and communicate the value.  And slowly but surely, the industry (Newsgator is built on .NET technologies) is now fulfilling the prophesy.  “Vision” or a “Lucky Guess”?  You decide.  ;-)