When you go it alone, the chance of success is miniscule. We can work together or we can go it alone. Isn't it funny how close it is in pattern to the problem in blogging that created Twitter? # Everyone but three pubs, the NYT, WSJ and WP would benefit from a pay-as-you-go plan, but they won't do it. At some point you have to stop subscribing, and then you'll miss the article that you need/want to read.

And the New Yorker and New York and on and on. And the Detroit News, Denver Post and the Boston Globe. If I want to read an article in the Atlantic I have to subscribe.

Another bad example, in the news industry, where I and others, consumers of news, are constantly railing about the ridiculous economic model.

We got a little help there from Apple btw - of all the big vendors they probably could have owned podcasting, but they never made that move and that's something to be grateful for when you see all the great podcasts out there and more coming online all the time. Victory! Subscribing is still a mess, it doesn't have to be, but the open approach of podcasting got so entrenched that the users demand choice, expect it - and that barrier was too high for Spotify and Amazon to climb over.

To whit, every time someone says 'Listen to FreshAir where you get your podcasts,' I feel a huge sense of pride.

When people blame the big silos for the lack of movement in blogging they should step back and figure out why they left the door open for them to dominate? We had years to create a barrier of user expectation of choice, as was done in podcasting.

A few years later you wonder where all the blogs went.

But when no one dominates, the blogs get overwhelmed with these icons, then four years later someone invents Twitter which makes subscription a breeze. The small thinking approach was that since you're going to dominate, writing tools should just put an icon on their pages that subscribes in your reader. It required cooperation among the various writing and reading tools.

Subscribing is a mess in the RSS world, but at the start there was a plan for it not to be a mess.

'it's just sad that people always think so small.' #.

I did a lot of writing in response, but in the end I deleted it all and replaced it with a single sentence, really just a phrase.

Yesterday Manton asked why I thought his book was sad.

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