The Cost of Openess

Ok, been another break between newsletters, think I will move to a new post every two weeks. This newsletter will feature some things from a couple of months back when I initially started writing this installment.

So.....

Will AI Spell the End for Free Blogging?

We’ve all become used to “doing a Google” on topics, finding a blog by a new content creator or one created by someone we already like and appreciate.  Discovering new voices is wonderful, as is reading someone’s voice who you love, get benefit from in one way or another, or just makes you think. I've heard thinking is good!

We’re becoming so inundated withs 30 second video shorts, hot takes, 60 second breakdowns of a topic, EVEN stretching to 3-minute videos. 

“Nobody can concentrate for that long, 3 minutes, it’s not possible” – said someone on the internet"

The humble blog or written word has a special place, use of written language to explain complex topics, to reinforce a concept or to make you change your mind completely.  Adding depth, colour, clarity, humour to difficult topics.

To open your brain, feed me, give me all the things!

Posting on LinkedIn recently (well 2-3 months ago eeek), Oscar Martínez Valero , told how he was one of the few people to succesfully demonstrate a particular concept in Power Query. Power Query is a tool built into Excel & Power BI to connect, clean & combine data but don't worry, there's not a quiz on this.

“I am one of the very few people who have cracked and freely shared how to retrieve keys from KeyVault using PowerQuery.

After asking Google how to do this, the AI Overview output that appears at the top of the results, is primarily composed of content from my in-depth walkthrough, supplemented with additional resources, but no visible source attribution.” Yes, many links direct to my website, but how many people click on them? I can tell, a shit lot fewer than before.”

Now Oscar is seriously considering whether it is worth sharing free knowledge/content anymore.  I know several fantastic content creators who have simply stopped writing blogs and mainly moved to YouTube videos as they don’t want their content crawled by an LLM and to financially benefit the LLM/Corporation. Although, pretty sure they're crawling videos too.

Link to Oscar's full LinkedIn post is below.

Will all this content be moved behind a paywall?  Good content is worthwhile so perhaps supporting writing we appreciate, and value should be rewarded.  Financial rewards are often low down the list of content creators’ reasons for writing, if even on it at all.

More and more writers, bloggers, dare I say "content creators", are moving some or all of their work to behind a paywall. Keeping some of their work free while gaining income seems a pretty good trade off since LLM companies are profiting from free content.

Writers who helped build, and maintain, the internet's value through sharing for free are now seeing that same openess devaluing their work when LLM's re-use it for monetary gain. What do we lose when writers stop sharing freely?

A slight aside, lawsuits are ongoing and just recently Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5bn to authors for their use of pirated materials.

The Networker

John Naughton is an academic, longtime technology journalist and writer of The Networker column which appears in The Observer, highly recommended.

A recent column of his detailed how Cloudflare declared “content independence day” on the 1st of July.  They’ve put measures in place to block AI web crawlers, that scrape online content, from accessing sites that run on CloudFlare’s servers.  I don’t know if this is a “get-aroundable” solution or not, but this is heartening to see a tech company not sitting on its hands, I won’t deny they probably also see this stance as a business opportunity too. 

Other Stuff for your eyes & ears!

Podcast called "Missing in the Amazon" detailing how the British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian indigenous defender Bruno Pereira, 3 years ago, vanished while on a reporting trip near Brazil’s remote Javari valley. The 6 part series investigates what happened and why.

When I heard of the disappearance 3 years ago, the name Dom Phillips struck a cord, he was a well respected journalist, editor and voice within the dance music industry. He collaborated with a dance music compilation series called Global Underground, which I love, he wrote many of the sleeve notes and travelogue books that came with each release.

He passionately wrote about politics, povery, cultural development, and the environment in Brazil.

He'd been working on a book called How to Save the Amazon, a group of expert writers completed his unfinished work covering deforestation, indigenous populations, farming, and politics of the Amazon.

People Watching

I've been a big fan of Sam Fender for a while now so it was great to see him win the 2025 Mercury Prize last week, absolutely love this track, can't get it out of my head.

HS2 cost how much?????????

The wild story of HS2, the UK's most embarrassing & costly infrastructure fiasco detailed in this great podcast, which I listened to on the train to work for ulimate irony

Do Big Things

Then followed that up with this great book on the world of massive infrastructure projects, why they often go awry, over budget and just plain wrong.

Bad 'uns - California High-Speed Rail, Danish Green Belt underwater tunnel for trains, Sydney Opera House, don't worry, there's more!

Now, there are success stories in here also like the iPod, Danish Wind Power, Heathrow Terminal 5 to name a few.

The author does a great job of critiquing the failure of massive projects and lays out why others succeed and the learnings from both. Highly recommended.

Book Club - Completed it Mate (Well, the book for September at least)

The Bad Ass Bookshelf book for September was a thoughtful belter!

Really loved this book on how to develop, enhance, and repair our meaningful human connections, so good I'll be reading it again. I was going to call it a manual, but guide fits it better, on how to live and love better with those around us, seeing ourselves more clearly and others more deeply.

One phrase that sticks in my brain is "Pain not transformed, is transmitted"

Ok, that is all from me.

Laters