From notes of the Voxpolitics event on blogs and politics (I have no idea what it was, you can start digging in from here) [via Cindy Lemcke-Hoong], about Stephen Pollard, “first major journalist in the country to be running a weblog”:
And he’s not writing for free – people respond to his comments and inspire him to write pieces for which he gets paid.
This simple phrase gets the value of blogging for free – it inspires you to come up with other pieces (with more insight/analysis/depth/structure) to get paid for.
For me it would also draw a border for copyrights: I’d like to “own” my blog (to give it away under Creative Commons) even if it is related to my work, while my company owns more elaborate products (e.g. papers) that can be inspired by it (of course when a company pays me to work on these products :).
In fact I don’t like to get paid to blog, because I want the freedom of doing it and I want to own the content. I’m also addicted to blogging enough to think that I would not be happy if I couldn’t do it. And I have scary phrases in my contract to worry about these issues :(
[Related: What Does European Law Say About Blog Ownership? (thanks to Martin Roell), Between bloggers and their employers, Bloggers Gain Libel Protection, BlogTalk: who owns narrated experiences?]
Tags: blogs in business, citedCh3, content ownershipArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/07/16.html#a672; comments are here.
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