Those following the flurry of commentary taking place around Chris Anderson's "Long Tail" thesis will appreciate a column in today's Wall Street Journal titled "Web Allows Fans to See Wide Variety of Movies That Were Hard to Get" (subscription required). The article notes in passing the obstacles being encoutered in clearing the rights for much of the unavailable content, in this case films. Google has encountered similar obstacles in its implementation of what was once known as Project Ocean, now more broadly as Google Print.
On a related note, I had a good conversation the other day with Tom Abate, a financial reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle, who has taken a personal interest in the changes being wrought by technology on media. His calls his blog, which promises to be quite interesting, Minimediaguy. One early post mentioned Lulu, but Tom called me because he was mistakenly contacted by a member of Lulu's PR team in connection with a recent press release (about JPG Magazine, the most recent project of Derek Powazek and Heather Champ). Because he covers finance, the story wasn't really up his alley, but he wondered if we contacted him because we had run across his blog. While that was not the case, I'm glad to have had a chance to chat.
Derek Powazek, by the way, is up for a Webby [2/01 correction: up for a bloggy this year, apparently, for lifetime achievement (he is all of 31 years old, but he's got my vote). I know his site fray.com won last year for best art site (or something along those lines). I'm still hoping a newspaper or magazine picks up the JPG Magazine story. Here's a guy who has created a number of web communities with incredible traffic and participation that most companies would kill for and he's done so solely out of his own artistic impulses. But he's never been able to earn a penny from these successes. JPG Magazine is certainly not going to make anyone rich, but at least Derek and Heather are making back a bit of money for all the effort that went into it.
