When people in the news business try to figure out how to make news pay after the Internet, it seems analogous to the French, after being invaded by Germany in World War II, trying to figure out where to put the new Maginot Line.

The Maginot Line would have been a perfect defense in World War I. It didn't help much in the second war.

Analogously, there was a perfect paywall in the pre-Internet news business, the physical product of a newspaper. There is no equivalent in the new distribution system

Howard Weaver's latest post put this into focus for me. That, and the recent attention on Groupon, which it seems to me has usurped, again, one of the big roles that local news organizations could have played, obviating the need to find the new paywall.

The first usurpage was of course Craigslist. It wasn't so obvious then that this was the natural domain of the press, because Craigslist made a small fraction of the money the news industry used to make from classifieds. It looked like CL was just undermining the press, not competing with it. But Groupon -- this is the fastest-growing company in all time. The founder says what they do is find ways for people to get out and enjoy their city. And they make a boatload of money doing it.

Here's one way of looking at what both Groupon and local news organizations do -- they put smart hard-working people into the field to keep tabs on what people in the community are doing. Some of what they are doing is robbing and killing each other, that's what news is interested in. Another part of what they're doing is buying from and selling to each other. Groupon is making huge bucks on that.

It seems there's still time for a philosophy change in the news business. Become more focused on the commerce of your communities, and the opportunities to make money will become more apparent. Seems common sense to me.

This of course is fodder for tomorrow's Rebooting the News.

 12/12/2010; 4:31:50 PM.   .

Okay I've decided to confront my Unix phobia head-on.

I used to be a Unix programmer, many moons ago, when I was a grad student at the University of Wisconsin. It was my first interactive experience with a computer. I remember it fondly. And what I have to do with this Unix server is not very ambitious. Here's the deal.

It's a server running on Slicehost, which they have given me to play with for $0. Can't beat that deal.

It's got Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (lucid) freshly installed. I have root access, and have been able to log on via SSH. All is good so far.

Here's what I want to do:

1. Get Apache running. Apparently it's not running now on the server.

2. Install a GUI that I can use over VNC. I basically need to be able to edit text files. In a pinch I could do without this if the FTP access is good.

3. Make sure FTP is working so that I can FTP into the HTTP directory.

4. SMB server set up so I can access the file system from my Mac desktop at home and from my Windows servers.

Maybe there's another version of Linux that would be easier to set up? Here's a screen shot that shows what my other choices were (although some of them may have a surcharge).

 12/12/2010; 2:57:32 PM.   .