Educational Blogging (cont.) - Is it free?

" ... Movable Type is a dead end. In the long run, the utility of all non-Freesoftware approaches zero. All non-Free software is a dead end.” And although Movable Type recanted, many bloggers moved to an open source blogging tool, WordPress (http://wordpress.org/).24 "

Although the article did not mention the word Web 2.0, but the article in itself is very Web 2.0 ish. Stephen brought an interesting point about proprietary Web 2.0 software where it might be free or very cheap in the beginning, eventually will raise their fees and prices for their services. One of the element that I think it drives Web 2.0 to the fore-front is the fact that it is FREE. I mean how cheap can it be? Everybody like things to be free right? Like my economic professor once said:

" There are no such thing as free lunch. "

Basically all these free Web 2.0 tools out there, somebody is paying for it. Though Stephen did not say it in his article, but I think he is hinting the fact that in the near future, some of these tools might not be free. That could have a detrimental effect to public education, especially schools who are using these technologies in under-funded school district.

Stephen also mentioned the fact that another alternative would be using open-source software such as WordPress, but that still has a price tag to it. Yes, open-source software by definition is free software, but somewhere down the chain, there are people who support the application, like writing patches, debugging, coding and etc. Still, it is not exactly free. If the developers one day stop supporting their open-source product, that could also have a negative effect in the community.

The reason why I am discussing about this is because Web 2.0 is a great period to witness but I think it is still very unstable because no one really knows where this is heading. Information in the web is growing at an astronomical rate, where users sometime have to filter a lot of misleading info to get to the factual one. Information overload anybody? Knowledge which takes decade to learn and comprehend now takes months to master and on the same token, knowledge that you knew a month ago might be irrelevant the next month. So what gives?