Interlude I

With the advent of the Web we have entered a new era in publishing. Prior to this time, anything that you read (or viewed) had very rarely been 'free'. By free I mean :-

    a) Financially - You had paid for the 'pleasure' and/or the author had been paid for it's production; and

    b) Between the author and yourself there was some form of editor who decided how much of the authorial output should be passed on to the public, and even before the author, there was some peon from 'marketing' who had decided what it was that you wanted on your behalf.

Well things have changed.

I'm not being paid to produce this, and you're not paying for the privilege (if I may be so bold) of reading this.

So why am I doing this ?
For the hell of it ? - not really.
Because it's there ? - not exactly.
Because I can ? - Well that's certainly closer.

We have the opportunity to make use of this medium in this way and we cannot afford to lose that. Advertising is already creeping onto pages, and into the messages on the web which means that there is the potential that 'money' will command and control a greater and greater share of web content and I, for one, don't look forward to that.

I am not making money out of these pages (in fact I am paying for these pages to be hosted by the ISP). It's the least I can do. If I had buckets of money, there is a brilliant young author I know that I would pay to have published with no expectation of a financial return - but I ain't got that kind of cash - so I'm doing this.

What are you doing ?