Now everyone can easily be WSJ.com. Or WebmasterWorld.
Cute video here:
[google.com...]

WSJ says Google will take 10 percent, compared to Apple taking 30 percent.
[online.wsj.com...]

It's getting interesting folks. It's fascinating to me how publishers who have been giving it all away for over a decade are now complaining about providing a percentage cut to a system they refused to build themselves. Associated Press' failure on providing vision and leadership to newspapers was breathtakingly terrible.

This is an incredible entree - and depending upon how you use it, everyone is now a realtime publisher, if you have the content, and can manage it.

Its all a bit light on detail at the moment but it looks very interesting. It isn't clear if this is something that is pretty well plug and play or if it needs some programming skill to set up. That will make a great difference to who publishes through it. It would certainly be nice to give the small independent magazines a route to electronic media. (I have a vested interest here of course, being editor of a niche magazine)

Of course it was possible to roll your own before -- the great thing about this is that the model may become more common so that people get used to it.

Why is this so much better than using a CMS of some kind to manage your online publication?

I was just reading about this on another tech site and apparently, by default, all our personal information will be provided to the publishers unless we explicitly opt-out. Nice incentive to get publishers aboard but just another example of exploitation and violation of individual privacy.

This is a significant step forward, I feel, and I'm delighted to see it happen, and I'm delighted to see Google coming in with a much more reasonable distribution fee than Apple's.

Way back in 2001, Sergey Brin and Larry Page were interviewed on Public Radio, and they were envisioning a content subscription model then, to compensate content creators. I mentioned it briefly in this post...

Google founders Brin and Page on public radio
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum86/26.htm [webmasterworld.com]

The original links in the above thread to the archived presentation have been broken. I'll post more recent links below. Regarding paying for content, though, in his prepared speech in 2001, Larry Page said...

From the transcript... [commonwealthclub.org...]

...So there's going to be a lot of access to information, and I believe that's a good thing in general. Companies like Google are trying to make sense of all that information that's going to be available.

One risk of that is that people don't get paid for their content, which is clearly a problem. I'd personally like to see a model where you can buy into the world's content. Let's say you pay $20 per month and get access to the world. Somebody else needs to figure out how to reward all the people who create the things that you use. This is basically what happens with a lot of systems today. Radio stations pay into a big fund, and then the organization decides which labels and which artists to reimburse, based on what got played on the radio. It's a nice model because it allows access to everyone for everything that exists, but you don't have to think about, "Oh, I'm going to spend five cents to look at this web page" or things like that. That will allow content producers to still get rewarded for what they do.

In the speech and the Q&A, Brin and Page also discuss distribution of other media along similar lines. The One Pass system isn't exactly what they describe, but it's a step. There may not be a one-size fits all approach that will make everybody happy, and there are competing interests with big money involved. It will require publishers, musicians, video creators getting it together to simplify things refine the model. Otherwise, Apple, which controls some important closed platforms, may continue to be able to charge 30% for that usage.

---

Here are links to the transcripts of the above broadcast in three sections. I distinctly remember some other material regarding mobile that's noted in my 2001 post but isn't included in these....

The Future Of The Internet
Google Co-founders - March 21, 2001
The Commonwealth Club

Intro
http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/01/01-03google-intro.html [commonwealthclub.org]

Speech: Sergey Brin - Larry Page
http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/01/01-03google-speech.html [commonwealthclub.org]

Answers to Written Questions from the Floor
http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/01/01-03google-qa.html [commonwealthclub.org]

There's also a "Purchase Tape" link for the audio that doesn't seem to be working, and it's hard to say what the format might be. It would be great if this were available in some sort of online audio format that could be archived and purchased at a reasonable price. ;)

PS: Yes, I'd like to have an opt-in information sharing policy too.

Nice incentive to get publishers aboard but just another example of exploitation and violation of individual privacy.

As a publisher I expect to know who is subscribing to my magazine.

Why is this so much better than using a CMS of some kind to manage your online publication?

My understanding is that G manages the subscription. This is for paid content not just slapping free information on the web.

As I said before the link was very light on hard information. Without applying and being accepted it is not possible to answer all the questions in detail.

another example of exploitation and violation of individual privacy.

I agree to some extent, but let's get real. There is much less privacy anywhere now unless you really work at being very private, and even then privacy is problematic. Step one is to get it out in the open so people know what they say and do is "on the record."

Nice incentive to get publishers aboard but just another example of exploitation and violation of individual privacy.

So you would hand over subscription processing to a third party who wouldn't tell you who the subscribers were?

The vendor needs sufficient information to be able to transfer processing to a different company or take it in house.

When "digital content" is mentioned, does that mean files like music too? Google's blog seems to allude to online journalism publications only.

As a publisher I expect to know who is subscribing to my magazine.

I'm not being critical of the publishers. I know you need to have that information. I'm pointing out that this is yet another way of Google getting between the source and end users for the sake of data mining. They aren't doing this for the benefit of publishers regardless of how pretty of a picture they paint. They will be using publishers as a source of more untapped data they may not have yet extracted.

When "digital content" is mentioned, does that mean files like music too? Google's blog seems to allude to online journalism publications only.

At the moment the only way you will find out is by signing up and getting accepted.

I'll pass on "One Pass".

If they had tried to introduce this 8 years ago we may have had some interest, but not now.

Trust Google to be our gatekeeper, and toll-man?

Not on your Nellie!

When they first introduced "Google Analytics", I didn't think it was wise to allow Google access to our visitor data, so we didn't bite that carrot.

The Schmidt years proved beyond doubt the wisdom of this decision.

Now that Eric has pronounced his apprentices "fit to cope without him", the naive amongst us have no excuse for trusting Google with anything.

We've recently banned the "Google Preview", and "Google Wireless" scraper bots, and GoogleBot better behave itself and fully honour our no-cache directives and policies, or else it too will be banned.

We, and you, can live without Google; but Google can't live without quality sites.