The Q/C ratio
So is the quality/crap ratio deteriorating in the free regions of the Internet? Here are some thoughts from Adrian Viegas in Techtree.com: India’s High Tech Daily:
I had depended on the Internet a lot when I was doing my first year of masters in English Literature. My work didn’t give me the time to visit libraries, but it opened the entire Internet to me. Information was very easily available. More important was the quality of the essays and reviews posted on the Internet. Quite often I needed information and quotes of a critic on a particular text and it was up there on the Net in someone’s essay. The next year I just couldn’t recognize the Internet. None of the sites I had bookmarked opened. If they did, they asked me to pay…
So what did happen to the Internet? It seems going paid killed it. And what I can’t understand is why we let it happen. Those essays were mainly written by students who posted on the Internet, because they knew they were good and people would find them useful. Now I ask what happened to the next generation of students. Instead of knowledge being free we have neatly gone and packaged it and called it eLearning for which you pay a bomb.
Needless to say, a TeleRead-style approach could improve the quality-crap ratio of freebies while providing for proper incentives for content-creators.
Detail: I certainly don’t agree with all that Viegas says about e-books: “The Internet has given us ebooks, but no one really wants to make a portable reader that can be carried around. True you get cell phones and a few PDAs supporting ebooks, but they aren’t fun. ” Hmm. Between the Cybook and my Sony PDA–and good e-book sites such as Blaskmask–I’m in hog heaven. Yes, things could be a lot better; and many, alas, would agree with the Washington education lobbyist who told me: “Who wants to read old books?” But I think Viegas reaches too far to make his point.
April 6th, 2005 at 3:15 pm
Schade das hier alles nur auf englisch ist.Es siht sehr interessant aus und ich würde mich gerne mal durch die Seiten wühlen.
Gruss
Baba
Webmaster of the Angeln Blog
June 26th, 2005 at 6:30 pm
Dank für Schreiben, Kuchen. Traurig ermangele ich einen deutschen Übersetzer. Wenn Sie Vorbereitungen bilden können, würde ich geehrt, um dieses blog übersetzen zu lassen. - David (über Übersetzer Googles)