Comments, observations and thoughts from two bloggers on applied statistics, higher education and epidemiology. Joseph is an associate professor. Mark is a professional statistician and former math teacher.
Monday, February 14, 2011
"The Economics of Blogging and The Huffington Post"
After the election season, my regular visits to FiveThirtyEight tapered off then simply came to a stop.
If the Huffington Post really had built up its empire on the backs of uncompensated writers, it would be like AOL, which recently settled a decade-long class action lawsuit against former volunteers:
AOL was assigning shifts to volunteers - and back-end administrative work, and technical support work - as well as requiring that they follow strict top-down guidelines for the enforcement of community standards. In other words, it really was outsourcing the real work of the company.
The analogy I used when I was handling some of the documents in that case was the "camera" Terry Pratchett described in his Discworld series: a technology company on the outside, but on the inside, lots of tiny demons painting pictures.
If the Huffington Post really had built up its empire on the backs of uncompensated writers, it would be like AOL, which recently settled a decade-long class action lawsuit against former volunteers:
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program
AOL was assigning shifts to volunteers - and back-end administrative work, and technical support work - as well as requiring that they follow strict top-down guidelines for the enforcement of community standards. In other words, it really was outsourcing the real work of the company.
The analogy I used when I was handling some of the documents in that case was the "camera" Terry Pratchett described in his Discworld series: a technology company on the outside, but on the inside, lots of tiny demons painting pictures.