links for 2009-02-24

"Everybody I know watched the Oscars, except the people I know best: the collection of affluent Protestant families society typically refers to as “old money.” These dynastic clans, who have held fortunes over several generations, are traditionally anti-Hollywood, and their disapproval of celebrity and the attention paid to movie stars is never so apparent as it is during Oscar season."

Popular sites like Facebook, Twitter and Bebo risk "infantilising" the minds of users, creating a generation of children who demand instant gratification, it is argued.

This notion of charging for content is an old idea not simply because newspapers and magazines have been doing it for more than four centuries. It's also something they used to do at the dawn of the online era, in the early 1990s. Back then there were a passel of online service companies, such as Prodigy, CompuServe, Delphi and AOL. They used to charge users for the minutes people spent online, and it was naturally in their interest to keep the users online for as long as possible. As a result, good content was valued.