Not again ... another plea to wall off online info

Yet another poorly researched idea for saving newspapers has surfaced -- again in the SF Chronicle, which seems to require one of these harebrained ideas every so often.

The latest is from ex-Timesman Joel Sawyer Brinkley, who, as did David Lazarus in that link above, toys with the idea of giving papers an antitrust exemption so that they can join together in ways of charging for their content. I am so tired of these things, and there are so many reasons they won't work. I'll let Steve Yelvington do the takedown this time.

But if media companies do create a walled garden, what would sites like Digg do? Apparently not much better than Digg is doing now, according to Business Week, which got a look at its financials.

Bottom line: There will be another Web 2.0 shakeout by 2010. Several favorite, well-known sites will go under. Some things we now have free online will start charging (just not newspapers ... among the things I would pay $20-$40 a year for are Furl, an online storage site like A-drive and maybe one news aggregation site that had really good resources and really good filters. But note my price point. I suspect it is not much different than many people's. In other words, I have about $500 a year to split among my online resources.