Stowe Boyd

The enemy is not the innovators. The enemy is the idea of not doing anything, and thinking that change is not going to happen.

- Nate Weiner, cited by Lois Beckett in Instapaper, Read It Later, Byliner: Platform founders on the pageview economics of time-shifted reading. Weiner is also the guy who calls time-shifted reading ‘Tivo for the web’.

How to balance the desire of readers to filter ads with the desire of publishers to have embedded ads in works?

Weiner, the founder of Read It Later, tries to make the point that the innovators — like Weiner, Marco Arment of Instapaper, and John Tayman of Byliner — are just doing what readers want. The trick will be figuring out a way to make the publishers happy.

In a fluid world, the notion of web pages (except as an archival mechanism) is changing rapidly. A URL is a unique ID referencing an object, most importantly, a handle that can be used to dereference: to access the object being referenced, and pulling its contents into some context.

The issue is, then: Are the ads associated with works part of the work or an additional bit of stuff?

From the viewpoint of the reader, the ads are extraneous, and not inviolably part of the work, because filtering them in no way degrades the experience of the article, photo, video, or audio.

I believe that a new sense of ‘fair use’ will have to evolve, and it will be somewhere to the left of what publishers like. For example, something like the reverse of the model for online newspapers, where I can access the NY Times without fee for up to 20 times per month. Perhaps a model would evolve where I can skip NY Times ads in Read It Later for 20 times per month, after which I have to see at least one of their ads in subsequent viewings?