Round Up

From the TimesOnline:

The internet, in the television industry as in many others, is both the infection and the cure. It will do to television what it has done to journalism: make everyone a producer and everyone a potential star.

Chris Anderson writing at the Long Tail writing about Random House’s Crown imprint’s first free book experiment:

Nicholas Carr writing at the Britannica Blog on the new economics of culture:

As the Internet becomes our universal medium, it is reshaping what might be called the economics of culture. Because most common cultural goods consist of words, images, or sounds, which all can be expressed in digital form, they are becoming as cheap to reproduce and distribute as any other information product. Many of them are also becoming easier to create…

The shift from scarcity to abundance in media means that, when it comes to deciding what to read, watch, and listen to, we have far more choices than our parents or grandparents did. We’re able to indulge our personal tastes as never before, to design and wrap ourselves in our own private cultures. The vast array of choices is exciting, and by providing an alternative to the often bland products of the mass media it seems liberating as well. It promises, as Chris Anderson writes in The Long Tail, to free us from “the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare” and establish in its place “a world of infinite variety.”