The Economist (bloody expensive but the most consistently good read) has set up this site to ask people for help figuring out what TNBT is in content production. A lovely question which does get the grey matter going, but unfortunately the Terms of Use are draconian. As such, I prefer to post my neat proposition here.

Note that the ideas expressed in this post are free to use by all entities for any purpose (including but not limited to producing more intellectually stimulating toilet paper), with the exception of The Economist Group. The Economist Group will have acquired the right to employ ideas expressed herein when they have:

• Done an article on Richard Stallman, suggesting at some point that he has been consistently overlooked for a Nobel prize (bonus points for dissing his personal hygiene)
• Caused pandemonium by delivering printouts of the fark.com front page on a daily basis for one year to the doorstep of 10 Downing Street, with the top story headlined in a suitable gothic font with a few !!!111OMGLOLWTFBBQ tacked on at the end
• Revised the Big Mac index to a more accurate bundle (beer, rice, and gummy bears, people. Staple diet)

Read on. I am done with the silly bits in this post.

One of the key lessons from the new content providers who have done well is that they control the channel rather than the content coursing through it. Some of the more successful not only offload the content production on the users but also editorial decisions, such as what material is better and what is worse. A challenge here is that of mob rule; a wonderful example of this is a lot of user moderated sites acquiring more of a left-wing slant (which, political inclinations aside, repositions the service). A second challenge is avoiding the content from becoming the product of the base mean of the minds contributing to it. A third challenge is finding the right balance between granularity of contribution and ease of use; on the one hand, the system employed to hammer out a draft of the GPL v3 license is remarkable for how it enables discussion and idea generation around the smallest minutiae; on the other hand, it is extremely unfriendly to the less technically inclined. Governance models for the new media seem to be more a function of how it is positioned rather than actually how equitable or user-responsive the model is; Digg and Reddit do not go out of their way much to let users define channel characteristics; wikipedia goes further - both seem to attract a similar share of critique which may possibly just be considered the gratifying background noise of a committed userbase.

Addressing these challenges and observations, it seems logical that a service would work where key contributors are identified and solicited to form a critical mass of mind share and content generation. The contributions would likely be original content, and high ratings would be compensated precisely as well as writers for the Economist normally are. Content rating would be done by Economist staffers proper, avoiding mob rule and quality deterioration. Barriers to submission would be zero, much as with this project. The front end would resemble the current economist site; a feeder site would be provided for the social aspect, editing and rating and submission being done in public. For the gripers, a parallel and unendorsed system could be provided for users to rate content; let the users battle it out with the editors for the better outcome.