The score, in case you’re keeping track, is Innovative Technologists 1, The Daily 0. The newly minted The Daily is now available on the web… kind of.
The iPad only news source is now being indexed on the web over at The Daily: Indexed. Andy Baio has been indexing the tweets from The Daily and putting them into a Tumblr website for everyone to read. For the uninitiated, The Daily’s articles are only available on the iPad, but the application has tools built into it that let you share stories to your favourite social networks. Instead of putting the articles online for all to read, The Daily gives people the ability to link to one particular article. Your friends can then go and read the article that you shared online, without having to buy the application first. Great in theory, but it seems like Biao is slyer than most and found a work around. He simply searches out the shared article, and provides links on The Daily: Indexed. Clearly there’s a chink in The Daily armor.
It’s kind of humerous seeing how quickly someone found a work around to The Daily’s paradigm. But, the implications are pretty serious. The Daily’s business model just took a huge hit. The site probably won’t be around much longer. Biao’s experiment has made a statement: protecting digital assets is a lot more difficult than protecting print. In a social media world, it’s virtually impossible to keep the cat in the bag. Once you give users the ability to share your articles online, you’ve lost control of where that media goes, and how it gets where it’s going.
It’s been fun watching how old media is trying to create a new-age paywall with their content, while still trying to maintain a social presence online. Getting content out to social networks and archived in search engines, while forcing people to pay for news is a relatively new attempt. It’ll be interesting to see how The Daily addresses this Index issue moving forward.
Article Via MacStories
