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Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Hound: a grep-alike that searches inside PDFs
« Last post by mouser on December 05, 2009, 05:51 PM »used this today, worked like a charm 
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And a commenter in that thread questions exactly what I always question: if newspapers (and radio, and TV, and...) have *always* made their money almost *exclusively* from advertising, then why is advertising suddenly not a viable model for sustainable web businesses?
Paywall is suddenly a hot topic as free content turns many longstanding businesses -- news among -- to apparent ruin. News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch is mad as hell, and he's not going to take this anymore. This week Murdoch repeated his call for paid services during a U.S. Federal Trade Commission public workshop. "We need to do a better job of persuading consumers that high-quality, reliable news and information does not come free," he said. "Good journalism is an expensive commodity."
But how is the value of the digital content, whether news or some other commodity, determined when so much of it is free? Bill Buxton, principal researcher for Microsoft Research, briefly addressed this topic during an October talk at the Business Innovation Factory. "When the cost of goods approaches zero, the effective price inevitably for that product goes to zero," he said. "We've seen it in music, and the music pirates -- maybe they were bad, maybe they weren't -- were not causing it; they were just accelerating it. Every single other entity that goes digital has zero cost of goods. So, whatever's happened in music is going to happen in literature, news, cinema, theater and so on."
The prevalent theory is to fund all this stuff with advertising. "But if everything is going digital, going onto the Net, where is the money for advertising going to come from?"..