Google Apps

Google have provided a whole suite of tools for business users that include group calendars, document editing and email hosting. This is a must have for any business on a budget. On setting up a domain for use with Google Apps you have a suite of online tools for your staff. The most central to this is your own company email on the Gmail platform, once you have that you can easily set up groups and mailing lists for your staff to use internally. The email server can also be used outside of the browser with Thunderbird or Outlook as well as your Blackberry or whatever. There is also a very useful group calendar available and the ability to set up a group wiki with a few clicks. While setting up your domain initially might be a little tricky for the technophobe, everything else is straight forward to use.

Amazon Web Services and Scalr.net

Not free this one, but an extremely cheap way to get dedicated hosting. If you have a busy web site and have been paying through the nose for your hosting then this could be one way of saving a lot of your monthly budget. Also known as cloud computing, hosting on Amazon’s servers will make your websites (with a little bit of work) scalable. This will mean that when your traffic grows so can your sites. If you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty with your website but you’re not a computer scientist you can pair up AWS with Scalr.net which will handle all the technical side of scaling your sites.

Open Office

Open Office is an open source productivity suite that you can install directly on your computer. If you’re not comfortable with leaving everything in Google’s hands then this could be a viable alternative to purchasing a usuable copy of Microsoft’s Office. Open Office has everything you would expect from Office with wordprocessing, spreadsheet, databases, graphics and presentation packages included in the package. You can’t really get a much better software product for free.

Fortunately we were ready this time, with load balancing and caching in place on both sites there was an initial slow down as new servers booted up but then we were ready for action. According to Google Analytics (which is way out but gives you some kind of idea) on Gigwise on Saturday we had 24,968 visits, then Sunday while the final build up to the chart count down was happening and we were covering the angles we had a massive surge to 58,268 visits. That’s more than double and it was also a weekend.

Entertainmentwise told a similar story with 29,537 visits reported on the Saturday with a big jump to 58,850 visits on the Sunday.

I sometimes get so snowed under that planning for stuff that rarely happens can get knocked down a long to do list, but it just goes to show that it’s worth Being Prepared for things like this as no doubt we’ve opened up to a few new users.

There seems to be a chasm dividing the two camps of agreement on this issue. Over on the right wing we have self appointed keepers of quality media who claim that their huge conglomerate businesses can’t survive unless they start charging punters instead of giving away their hard earned work “for free”. Over (and I mean a hell of a way over) on the left there are the information-wants-to-be-free brigade who seem to think that journalism is something that can be done by anyone with little training and has little or no real financial value. Some of these far lefties even seem to think that Twitter replaces real news coverage. (UPDATE Twitter doesn’t replace real news coverage!)

But as is always the case, in reality, things aren’t so black and white. As I’ve already discussed on the Giant Digital blog there could already be a marketplace for 4 million paying online newspaper customers in the UK alone, not to mention what size that market could be internationally. Certainly, a walled content garden could be worth millions of dollars annually for a company the size of News International.

However, this approach will not work for everyone. A regional newspaper group Johnston Press are also set to take their online content behind a paywall and players of this size are going to utterly kill their chances of increasing their revenue by closing off their local coverage from the outside world. Johnston Press sell their local weekly newspaper for 45p a shot and plan to charge a three month subscription for £5 providing (as pointed out by one of their employees) a massive saving of 40p over a three month period. When the BBC provide exactly the same coverage for free it’s unlikely that anyone is going to cough up any amount, however small that is for local news.

For huge media outlets with trusted brands (whether they should be trusted or not is a different matter) there will be an audience who will be willing to pay a small amount of money to continue to get news from their preferred sources, but for many brands that have always been online, the websites that I own included, there will not be the willingness by the public to suddenly start paying for content. Not that our content carries less value or influence, but users are very unlikely to pay for news from these sources after getting them for free for years. It is way too easy to go somewhere else for something similar and free.

This whole plot line reminds me of the music industry’s bid to get downloaders to pay for content they’d been consuming for free, which has probably been compared to death by now (and we all know where that story ended up, with multinationals charging us for music), but maybe less obviously of the bottled water industry which also caused a stir when it first started out. I can remember when the very concept of buying a bottle of flavourless water in a clear plastic bottle was seen as utterly ridiculous. “This will never catch on”, “down with this sort of thing” people used to say. Bottled water industry, worth $146.5 billion last year. Makes you think, huh?

Rupert Murdoch and chums will be laughing all the way to the bank on this one, but that’s cool because there will be a whole slew of people who will prefer to consume news for free that used to frequent NI et al’s websites who will be browsing on news sites that were born and bred on the internet and that means more advertising revenue for smaller/newer companies like mine. And of course, the mugs readers who have coughed up their subscriptions for newspaper+ will still be using the rest of the free internet after their 5 minutes of “proper news”. Surely a win-win for all concerned.