The Cost of Advertising
Subtitled the price of free…
As I mentioned I’ve been doing some stuff for a couple of local arts organizations and not surprisingly cost of service is an issue. In other words it pretty much needs to be free. This isn’t a problem in and of itself; there are more free services than I can keep up with, but there are some issues. Free often means that you’re paying with screen real estate; for a quarter of the screen they’ll let you post content on something that looks like your site. That seems fair but there are individuals who object to shilling for the corporate blogosphere, so I’ve been trying to stay with ad free; that’s not really a problem but there’s another issue that is, you might say ‘technical’. Power comes at the price of knowledge.
I don’t suppose that it’s exactly news that simple things don’t do as much as complex things, or that the more you want to do and the better you want to it the more you’re going to have to practice. In tech terms if you want a simple blog Google gives you Blogger and you can pretty much figure it out without any prior experience. It’s a fantastic interface and you can look like a professional blogger in a matter of minutes. What you can’t do is turn it into a content management system or a Wiki. You can use WordPress.com, which is also free, and comes close to something like a simple CMS, but the interface requires more effort and knowledge. If you want a Wiki WetPaint is about about equivalent to Blogger in terms of ease and obviousness. If you need more power try Wikidot, but again a less friendly UI and a steeper figuring-out curve.
It’s tempting to make parallels with information, and suggest that you get what you ‘pay’ for; pay in this instance equaling effort. TV news isn’t as in depth as newspaper news, but then again it’s much more immediate. The real point however, is that things are getting easier. Things you couldn’t do a year or two ago are now possible with just a bit of effort, and a year from now pretty much anyone* will be able to do them.
*Standard Caveat: Anyone with, electricity, computer access, a cell phone, etc. and we should remember that more and more people fall into this category.
