But You Can't Line The Birdcage With It

That's just one of the problems with trying to charge web readers for online news.

There is a great debate going on right now that will change the way we have come to expect to use the Web. For the best part of 15 years, most content online has been free. The saying has always been "Information wants to be free".

Content providers are realizing however that this is not sustainable. As print media downsize or shut down altogether, what will be the future of online news?

In yesterday's Financial Times, Rob Grimshaw, managing director of FT.com says the answer is that a “free evangelist movement [convinced] everybody that the internet was somehow different and any attempt to impose a business model was an imposition on people’s human rights”. Changing that perception will mean nothing less than challenging the culture of the internet as we currently understand it."

And how will bloggers like me, or even Glenn Reynolds or Matt Drudge for that matter, adapt when we can no longer link to free sources? The big guys may work out click-through deals because of their enormous traffic, but without "free passage" on the internet, the grass-roots phenomenon of little-guy blogging will have to adapt somehow.