| I don't know about Lynda, much of what I've seen on it is just ridiculously reliant on Adobe products. But in any case, while the content on these is great and all, what happens is that often you're then tied to a specific platform and there's no natural ecosystem at play here. You get what's currently promoted by the gatekeepers and you're getting there by somebody else paying for it. While there's a great amount of value in these services, the sheer property of having a simple URL for a tutorial that can be shared across the world with nothing but a copy and paste is, in my opinion, greater than the additional value these services provide. The value of being able to go on to any computer in the world, type in something random, as a suggestion from a librarian or a workshop in a library or whatnot, and clicking on the first YouTube video and knowing how to pick a YouTube video... that value is so utterly gigantic. And yes, Lynda and Udemy are important too, I agree. We've actually been working on making services like these (but not these, because not many public libraries subscribe to them) more discoverable for library patrons. But they're going to be much more specialised and deliver much less of an punch to the face in terms of impact on everyone than blah.html on joelsblog.freesites.info or youclue.com/watch?v=anrmAOL901mRC could. With monetisation instead through Google ads or funding from random sources, including government institutions, or YouTube ads, why not - if your potential audience is going to be something on the order of billions of people instead of millions? Do I disagree with you? At a good price point for library subscriptions, never. But I think there's more to it than that. |
I was just thinking about what could get me to go to my local libraries more, I know that they can't afford the books I want to read as they are all too new and specialist.