Henry Blodget, the guy many people blame (rightly or wrongly) for convincing them to invest during the dot-com bubble, wades into the “content creators vs. exploited masses” debate with a recent post on his blog Internet Outsider. Henry says that one of topics of conversation at a recent think-tank gathering was about aggregators like del.icio.us and Google and how they exploit those whose blogs or links or sites they aggregate.
The former brokerage analyst says that as far as he’s concerned, “All those people who built del.icio.us into what it is did so because they wanted to, and because it was useful, and that “similar, non-financial motivations drive the vast majority of unpaid bloggers (22 million and counting), blog commenters (100 million?), letters-to-the-editor writers, MySpace citizens, chat board participants, expounders, opiners, self-deemed experts, whiners, bar-stool philosophers, and assorted windbags (billions) that express themselves every day the world around.”
Most of these people, Henry says, “aren’t doing it for the money. And if someone else is making money off them, while enabling them to do what they love to do — and do of their own free will — well, then, more power to them). I would have to agree, as I’ve mentioned before.
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