I'm sure all my readers
know about
Techdirt:
Started in 1997 by Floor64 founder Mike
Masnick and then growing into a group blogging effort, the Techdirt
blog uses a proven economic framework to analyze and offer insight
into news stories about changes in government policy, technology and
legal issues that affect companies ability to innovate and grow.
The dynamic and interactive community of Techdirt
readers often comment on the addictive quality of the content on the
site, a feeling supported by the blog’s ~800,000 RSS subscribers,
45,000+ posts, 600,000+ comments and a consistent Technorati
Technology Top 100 rating.
(Yes, 45,000+ posts in
14 years: makes me look positively un-serious....)
One reason I'm pretty
sure anyone who follows my microblogs will know about Techdirt is
that I tend to post a huge number of links to its stories. Indeed,
sometimes I think it would be just easier to hook the Techdirt RSS
feed in directly and save myself all the trouble of doing it
manually.
That's an indication of
how closely aligned Techdirt is with much of the key stuff that I'm
interested in: copyright, patents, digital rights, business models,
digital abundance etc. Techdirt not only offers extremely
knowledgeable analysis that you simply won't find elsewhere, it makes
it all freely available – thus offering a good example of precisely
the kind of models based around giving stuff away that it discusses
and advocates.
Mike has already run
some of my pieces there, and I'm delighted that he's asked me to
contribute stories to the site on a regular basis. One knock-on
effect will probably be fewer standalone posts on this blog, but
overall the number of posts I write will probably rise. As for my
writing on other titles, I'll post links to everything here, which
will remain the central reference point in that respect.
Given this move, now
seems a good time to produce a formal
registry of interests, which I
have made a separate post for easy reference.