The Australian, The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, and another brick in the paywall ...

(Above: watching the watchers watch the watchers in the watch watching the watchers).

The phrase is sometimes attributed to Shakespeare, but in the usual way of things - since the bible has generated so many catchphrases and book titles - the credit goes to Luke 4:23:

And he said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Physician, heal yourself.’ What we have heard you did at Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well.”

Which naturally leads us to The Australian's editorial, Cyberspace is shopping heaven, this fine Saturday morning.

The anonymous editorial blogger is enraptured with online shopping and virtual malls, full as they are of range, quality of stock and superior service, and marvelling at the way Zappos has built an online shoe store business in a decade.

And every other retailer who thinks consumers can't make a decision without holding a product needs to ask where the record store that used to be next door has gone. Or why the bookseller is worried.

Indeed. And of course if you want to read a reasonably lengthy story about Zappos and its operations, you might just at this point switch over to The New Yorker, and read Alexandra Jacobs' Happy Feet Inside the online shoe utopia. That's a story currently available for free on the full to overflowing intertubes. And if you dash off to read it, remember you don't have to wonder why the newspaper proprietor looks so worried ...

Jacobs' has some fun with Zappos' core value routines - core value No. 1: Deliver wow Through Service, Core value No. 6: Build Open and Honest Relationships with Communication, Core Value No. 2: Embrace and Drive Change, and so on ... and only in the strange, surreal world of American retail ...

Naturally Zappos.com also has its own wiki, here, and naturally, for all the spruiking by the lizard Oz of the retailer, the wiki reveals that back in 2009 it became another arm of the giant Amazon conglomerate.

Naturally the Oz gets philosopical:

Online bookseller Amazon has long shipped books around the word and is now selling more e-books than hardbacks -- which makes the Labor government's decision last year to protect local publishers against imported print books, while building the National Broadband Network, more than passing strange.

Indeed, it was passing strange, and more than futile, and already the revolution in sales of e-books, driven by the likes of the iPad, has made the decision largely irrelevant.

But it also makes The Australian's reference to the NBN more than passing strange, as it celebrates virtual retailing while maintaining its ongoing war on the NBN.

Or could The Australian be changing tack? These days you have to search hard for its NBN Watch How your billions are being spent campaign, perhaps because the rag realises it's achieved a 'no sale', as punters concentrate on how they might spend their billions online ...

Whatever, it's a hoot to see The Oz go into online triumphalist mode:

The world is one big mall and the winners are everybody who wants to buy the product they prefer at the best possible price and don't care from where.

Yep indoody, so it was exceptional fun to listen to Alan Rusbridger from The Guardian last night on PM, on the way back from the airport - and plenty of time to listen, thanks to gridlock on the roads.

Did I mention that the ABC provides AM and PM for free, and that you can follow up on anything you've heard by looking at the transcript of the story online, here for this one? Talk about shopping for information at the best possible price, and not caring where it might come from ...

Rusbridger had a few salient points to make about the paywall paranoid fortress of doom mentality emanating downwards from chairman Rupert as he pondered the figures recently issued about The Times paywall experiment:

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: It looks as though in return for forgoing well over 90 per cent of your circulation, endangering your advertising flow, you end up with 20,000 to 50,000 paying subscribers which leads to a revenue, on their own figures, of about two to five million. I mean all money is useful at this point but I don't see that as the transformative step that everyone is going to follow.

You can of course read more in The Guardian on these figures - for starters, there's Times paywall - who pays what then..., and The Times paywall: making sense, and nonsense, of 'fluffy numbers'.

There's no paywall around them of course - but it's a tad hard to access whatever The Times might have to say about its figures, because there's no way to peek through chairman Murdoch's bamboo screen. Well not legally, but in this case, nobody seems bothered to do it illegally either.

Even more interesting was to hear that through the time of the paywall experiment, The Times has dropped 30,000 real world print copies:

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well that's the strange thing that no-one really foresaw coming. I mean I thought that if you switched off other, all other forms of getting The Times and Sunday Times digitally that the print sales would go up but it turns out that in fact The Times figures are sliding faster than anybody else in the quality market, which suggests to me that we overlook the degree to which the digital forms of our journalism act as a kind of sort of marketing device for the newspapers. And that if you put a gigantic wall around your content and disappear from the general chatter and conversation about your content then people forget to buy the paper as well. So it's a kind of double whammy.

And Rusbridger also had a word of warning about the sufferings of journalists behind the paywall, with frustrated tweets from journalists no longer part of the conversation:

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well I think you would be frustrated. I mean most of us go to journalism to try and reach an audience and to have influence and to be read and if you're aware that people are reading all your rivals but not you in the digital space and I think probably it makes it slightly harder to get stories because people think well why would we give The Times stories when they're so invisible in a digital space? So I think in all kinds of terms it's a rather problematic model.

Rusbridger also had plenty of intelligent things to say about how to co-opt activities on the internet - whether wikileaks or blogging - and make them part of a newspaper's brand, and so ride the wave rather than fight the surf (and so it has come to pass that The Guardian is doing very nicely in terms of digital revenue and online monthly readership).

His thoughts stand in stark contrast to the hostility which emanated from John Hartigan, only a year and a bit ago, when he berated aggregators in search of a free hard news lunch, and railed at amateur journalism for trivialising and corrupting serious debate ... it degenerates democracy into mob rule and rumour milling. (here).

This from the mob who deliver Fox News in the United States ...

Sure it was admirably cheeky, even if it was also completely silly.

Cyberspace is more than just shopping heaven, it's slowly becoming information heaven, though you have to have your wits about you as to what's reliable information ...

Everybody is now anxious to get in on the act, and become recyclers of content, and as intertubes' speeds and packages pick up, with or without the NBN in play, everything will change for information and entertainment providers.

There's currently an unseemly scramble in the Australian media scene as everyone seeks their place in the sun, from old players in the game to retailers anxious to shore up their position against virtual stores ...

These days if you haven't got a player for AV content, you're nowhere ...

Even poor old Fairfax is trying to play the game, as shown by classical music hater Tim Dick in his media column, with his piece Murdoch: the JFK yarn I killed, Obama's a one-termer and my paper-free newspaper.

Dick's actual piece is a non-event, just a few more rambles about past Chairman Rupert glories. What's interesting is his attempt to push an interview with Murdoch by Max Suich, thoughtfully providing actual links (twice) to the Suich story, which ran under the header Uncut: the thoughts of Chairman Murdoch, but is hidden behind the AFR's paywall, a paywall which has proven to be a disaster for the AFR.

Pardon me if I don't provide the links, there's teasing and then there's jerking a reader's chain. You can push me, you can pull me, but damned if that's a way to get me to subscribe to the AFR.

At the same time, Dick provides a link to a Fairfax hosted documentary on Rupert, Dynasties-Murdoch, which runs a full 56'53", and comes to you free after you've sat through a thirty second advertisement.

Sure there's the artefacts and blocking that comes with slow broadband and compression, and of course in the manner of FTA broadcasters you'll catch more ads if you can be bothered sitting down for an hour at your computer screen.

It smelt of hagiography to me, and so I passed - and besides it ran back in 2002 on the ABC, as part of Aunty's Dynasty series, and so is comprehensively out of date ...

But the notion that Fairfax now wants to turn itself into a kind of mini-broadcaster by running out of date ABC soft core docs reminded me of what a faster broadband system would mean for all players ...

And it makes The Australian's editorial header Cyberspace is shopping heaven triply ironic.

Besides shopping for shoes, and e-books, cyberspace is also a time wasting information heavy opinion laden heaven for consumers, and the winners are those consumers who want to avoid a paywall to find products they prefer at the price they're prepared to pay, especially if they do care where the content comes from, and the skew and spin it's been given ...

Roll on the paywalls down under. Let's see if cyberspace turns out to be News Corp paywall heaven ...

(Below: and now apropos of nothing, a tribute to the Brain, and his cunning plan to use the intertubes to become ruler of the earth. Love the brain).