There’s a lot of talk about “paywalls”. It’s usually about newspapers, and it’s almost always just about news. It shouldn’t be.

Nor should Rupert Murdoch’s introduction of a pay-to-view model be regarded as an act of desperation. This could be the moment newspapers finally begin to get it right.

Am I willing to pay for a trusted digital offering that helps make my life better, more prosperous, and better informed? Definitely.

Joe has already mentioned the first three presentations we saw at This Happened.

Joe Baskerville (Cogapp's Head of New Technology) and I went to Washington recently for the annual conference of the Museum Computer Network, where we were each presenting in a session.  MCN is always one of my favourite conferences to attend, not least because it is quite small, non-commercial, and most of the attendees are hands-on doing things with computers for museums.  So it's very friendly; and technical without being ludicrously geeky or divorced from practical uses for the technology.  As witness, my favourite slide of the conference (from an excellent and very well attended session on the Semantic Web from the Met's Koven Smith and Don Undeen):

Something that keeps cropping up whenever I meet with museum and gallery professionals is the tricky issue of Authorial Voice (caps added to make it sound more... er... authoritative).

The traditional model has of course always been: we tell you what we believe... and you (the public) believe us.

Journalism professor, Jeff Jarvis, has written an interesting piece in this week’s Media Guardian, provoked by the New York Times’ decision to abandon its policy, after two years, of charging for content online.