Rajesh Jain brings together three commentaries on information markets in one post. He adds only one line of context, explaining who is commenting on whom and what.
Ross Mayfield comments on Jeff Jarvis’s commentary on Eli Noam’s article in the FT on the market failure in the information economy.
That one line, plus the three paragraph-long excerpts he brings together and juxtaposes, alerted me to some analysis — and strong opinion about that analysis — that I otherwise missed. The root piece was on FT.com, which I don’t regularly visit. The column: Eli Noam: Market failure in the media sector. I found a few different lines in the essay more interesting than the specific thoughts about whether media is racing towards commoditization. The broader questions are worth thinking about, like:
…as countries rely more on information-based activities, their economies become more volatile. (snip) Thus, the information economy is likely to be a volatile, cyclical, unstable mess. The problem is not the “creative destruction” one would expect in an innovative economy, but the structural instability of an economy whose major products have very low marginal costs and hence prices, but are not low-cost to produce.
What’s also nice is that FT.com provides a counter-opinion right at the bottom of the page, also by a learned commentator.