One of my evening habits is to read the OLDaily from Stephen Downes. I use his free subscription service and am ready to do some reading once it arrives.
More often than not, he takes me into places that I wouldn’t normally go. Heck, much of the time he takes me to places that I didn’t even know existed! The end result is that I’m just a bit more knowledgeable than before I read his thoughts about resources and then I click through to read the original document.
A couple of times, I’ve read articles that are curated by my other sources – typically Flipboard and/or News360 – shared with anyone who cares to follow them and then they get back to me indicating that the article is behind a paywall. It’s hard to respond since you never know how others have things configured and, quite frankly, it worked on my end. I’d never share a resource that I hadn’t read myself.
Last week, Stephen included this resource in one of his daily newsletters.
I think I know Stephen’s thoughts about paywalls and so know how that he would have dug through this article. I was off to read it as well. I went into the article naively thinking that a paywall was either there or it wasn’t. I left the article amazed after learning about the Sophi Artificial Intelligence.
Does this explain why there are times that I can read an article yet others cannot. Had I stumbled right into this?
I recognise that some information providers are inclined to charge for access and others put it online and use other techniques to pay their bills. Somehow, this fits in the middle and, by design, muddles the situation.
The more you know, the more you know. This is a perfect example or why I like to read and learn.
Just when a topic like this seems to be black and white, we get this shade of grey!
doug --- off the record 
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