The Butt Ugly Weblog

No ei varsinaisesti ainoa tapa. Sarjakuvaa voi lukea selaimella osoitteesta http://www.comics.com/comics/hedge/. Vai onko selain jo liian ysäriä? :-)

"The other side of me just wonders, why is "making Hedge so easily and freely available" undermining economics? If your economics consists of making life difficult and expensive for the users, then perhaps yes, but if your point is to sell books - aren't you better off telling everyone about your great thing? You know, advertising?"

Voisiko olla, että se "economics" on tässä tapauksessa mainosten myynti sarjakuvaa näyttävälle saitille? Tämä on se tapa, jolla kustantaja tässä tapauksessa saa tuloja (ja toivottavasti maksaa siitä jotain piirtäjällekin).

Voi olla, että RSS:n käyttäminen fiksusti voisi mahdollistaa erilaisen bisnesmallin, mutta minusta yrityksen (tai sarjukavapiirtäjän, tässä tapauksessa) pakottaminen (laittomasti) johonkin toiseen bisnesmalliin ei ole fiksua tai kohteliasta. Jos valittu ansaintamalli on tyhmä, eikö sen toiminta joka tapauksessa tyssää jossain vaiheessa?

Taiteilijan retoriikasta olen yhtä mieltä kanssasi.

--KariHaakana, 25-May-2005

Joo, tuosta jäi pois teksti "with RSS". Tosin minulle tuo on melkeinpä ainoa tapa enää; selaimella sivulle meneminen on liian ysäriä ja hankalaa.

Erityisesti, kun järkevä tapa levittää sarjakuvaa tässä tapauksessa olisi keksiä tapa tuoda mainokset mukaan RSS-feediin, eikä hermostuttaa lukijoita typerällä retoriikalla. Mutta pointti oli lähinnä se, että scraping on liki mahdoton estää, joten sitä ei ehkä kannata edes yrittää. Sekoitan tässä nyt kaksi asiaa tapani mukaan...

Mutta eipä tähän muuta voi sanoa kuin lainata t-paitaa: "Your failed business model is not my problem."

--JanneJalkanen, 25-May-2005

25 May 2005 - Feed Suspended

This comic has been suspended at the request of the comics creator. Please see the link for more detail.

Yep - at least TapestryComics.com has stopped the RSS feed. Which means for me that I won't be reading Hedge anymore... I just can't be asked to go to a site every day - that's the reason I don't read Viivi & Wagner either.

--Kolibri, 25-May-2005

"Your failed business model is not my problem."

Niin tai siis eihän se bisnesmalli ole epäonnistunut, ainakaan vielä, kun palvelu kerran pyörii. Malli ei ehkä ole sellainen kuin sinä haluaisit, mutta se ei vielä tee siitä laajemmassa mitassa epäonnistunutta. Eihän?

--KariHaakana, 26-May-2005

Liian aikaista sanoa.

--JanneJalkanen, 26-May-2005

Russell Bearttie taitaa pohdiskella samoja asioita..

http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008477.html#comments

en ole tosin varma, koska en asiaan ole niin tarkkaan perehtynyt.

Henrikki

--194.136.183.15, 27-May-2005

Okay, my rhetoric was over the top. I apologize. But I'm pissed off. Your going to the bathroom during commericials analogy is off (or Tivo-ing through commercials). I'm not requiring anyone to actually read the ads or buy anything. I'm just requring everyone to understand that advertising pays the bills -- that you can't get something for nothing. By stripping the strip off the site without advertising you are saying that you deserve my product for free. You don't. And I don't have to make it available for free. And the economics of the comic strip syndication are such that we don't have books to sell or licensing. Hedge is a modestly successful strip. We make money off newspapers and the web. We're working on providing a UM RSS feed with ads attached. But it takes time and costs money.

Michael Fry

--Michael Fry, 30-May-2005

The "going to the bathroom" analogy is actually something uttered by a senior Turner executive (read the story here). It's the usual example that one digs out when someone goes really wild on defending advertising to the point of absurdity.

My point is that it's really, really, really hard to stop scraping (i.e. the practice of taking parts of the contents of a web site), illegal as it is, and I fear the day when someone figures out a "technical" solution for that problem. Because it's likely to make the life of the readers so much more difficult. Witness all the different DRM solutions that require you to understand "key management" and "authorizing computers".

This is why it is more productive to work with people who are innovating on your work. They have the capacity to make your work appealing to an even larger audience - they are not doing it because they are evil, but because they want to spread your work. They are *fans*, not thieves. They may not think about what it means to the author, but they sure get hurt when they are accused of theft and "pulling a gun on the artist."

I'm not offering any easy solutions to this. I do believe there will eventually be a balance somewhere here, but one thing is sure: the internet is different from traditional media, where few communicated to many. The ground is far more level here: many are talking to many, and perhaps the old ways of collecting money are not as effective here as they used to be. And I believe that the ones that are the first to experiment and embrace the new do have the best chance of ending up on the top.

But it's good to hear that you are working on this. Good luck! (And I'll continue buying Hedge books; I probably won't bother reading the online version until you have RSS available, though... I can get so many others to fill my daily fix of comics.)

--JanneJalkanen, 30-May-2005