After moving house, I decided my life has too much paper in it. At a estimate, paper made up almost a third of the weight shifted between houses.

Going 100 percent paperless is neither possible or desirable. But I can reduce my paper use by 90 percent. And recycling the bulk of my existing paper is a reasonable goal.

I’ve been a journalist for 30 years – which doesn't help. I have boxes full of newspaper cuttings, magazines I’ve written and edited and other portfolio material. It runs to many filing cabinets.

I’ve also been writing online material since the late 1980s – remember Apple’s eWorld, Compuserve and Bix?

A journalist’s portfolio is an important work record. It’s invaluable when finding new work – particularly now I’m a freelance writer.

The portfolio also has a wealth of useful information, story ideas and memory joggers.

Paperless, not perfect

I’ve systematically scanned and stored my old clippings. Reduced the inevitable duplication and generally tidied up. Scanning takes – I don't expect to finish for many months yet.

One lesson I learnt early on is to not be too fussy about scan quality. It needs to be neat and tidy, but it doesn’t have to be perfect.

Another lesson I’ve learnt is to store scanned material as PDFs. They are more compact and easier to use than TIFF or other file formats.

Perhaps the hardest aspect of converting my portfolio to a digital format is sharing. I can mail prospective clients examples of stories, but having material for casual browsers is difficult because web hosts charge by the MB for storage and I’m only allowed so much traffic a month. Big PDFs quickly chew through my quota.

As an experiment, I’m storing some portfolio PDFs in a public folder on my Microsoft SkyDrive. As an example, here’s a piece I wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald’s The Sydney Magazine in October 2004.

I’d be interested to hear of ways other paperless journalists are storing their portfolios.

In the last hour I checked the size of the front page of six news web sites using http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com. Here are the results:

• Fairfax's Stuff – 1.7MB
• The New Zealand Herald – 450Kb
• The Sydney Morning Herald – 940Kb
• The Australian – 874Kb
• Radio New Zealand News – 88Kb
• ABC News Radio – 294Kb

So you can read the Radio New Zealand News page 200 times and still download less data than a single read of Stuff.

While these numbers may not be important if you've got broadband and an unlimited download plan, they make a huge difference when you are on the end of a slow link or paying through the nose for each megabyte of data.

None of the sites attempted to show one of those awful TV style advertisements during this test. I hate to think what they might add to the totals.

Update: The National Business Review weighs in at 398Kb.

Despite the global financial meltdown and widespread lay-offs, Australia still faces serious skills shortages. The obvious answer is to drag in workers with the right qualifications and experience from overseas.

It’s not hard to attract skilled people to Australia; from many places overseas it can almost look like a Shangri-la. However, the bureaucratic hoops are daunting and, technology skills requirements are a fast-moving target so often, by the time applications are processed, employers demands have changed.

Today’s The Australian Financial Review reports the way the country grants overseas technology professionals entry to the country is set for an overhaul in IT projects force migration target change (the story is behind a pay wall). There’s a similar report at The Sydney Morning Herald : Migration rules set for revamp.

This is going to propel Australia’s economy. There are a number of big tech projects underway and a shortage of suitably skilled people to do the work. I’d like to see New Zealand take similar measures to make sure our nation had the skills it needs to compete on the world stage. Taking unemployed or under-employed professionals from the US, UK and other northern hemisphere countries that can’t or won’t make use of them makes a lot of sense.

Not only did Australia's two main print news media organisations reject Amazon's Kindle book reader, both made their rejection public.

Fairfax went overboard, publishing versions of the story in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and on its youth-focused site, The Vine. It didn't run in The Australian Financial Review.

News Corporation has been less vocal, although Rupert Murdoch did mention his dissatisfaction with the reader in comments after his company's annual results.

As this story in The Sydney Morning Herald explains, the problem is Amazon wants to clip the ticket by too much. Some reports suggest the company takes as much as 70 percent of the price of ebook sales and is seeking similar high margins from newspaper subscriptions.

Sony and Apple are possible alternatives. One aspect of this story is the assumption people will want to read online newspapers via a special reader and not with a PC or smartphone.

Kindle Rejected By Australian Newspapers | Fairfax Media, News Corporation.

The signals coming from Fairfax are jumbled, but the message is clear. Australia and New Zealand's largest publisher plans to follow Murdoch and charge for online news.

The signals are confused because on Friday, Stephen Hutcheon at the Sydney Morning Herald wrote a story about readers’ reluctance to pay for online news. On one level Hutcheon’s Not happy, Rupert: readers say they won't pay for online news was a simple dig at the rival News Corporation – complete with an unflattering photograph of Rupert Murdoch. He says News’ announcement was followed by 140 reader comments – mainly from angry readers threatening to go elsewhere the moment charges are applied.

Clearly Fairfax's left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing because Sunday saw Tom Hyland write Fairfax, News to charge for online at The Age website. He also wrote the longer Stop the presses. Hyland had the unenviable job of quoting Fairfax chief executive Brian McCarthy who told him; “charging for online access was essential if publishers were to maintain their newsroom staff.”

You always know things are going to get tricky when a newspaper executive uses a word like 'monetising' and Hyland quotes McCarthy getting his teeth around that in the very next paragraph. He went on to talk about a two-level model at the The Age and the The Sydney Morning Herald websites.

Of course Fairfax is no stranger to charging for online content. The company's The Australian Financial Review has long been one of the regions few major titles to eschew the free online model and charge readers. By all accounts the AFR's pay wall hasn't been successful, but it will have taught the company useful lessons about turning reader clicks into money.

Practical subscription models are possible. Micro-payments need more work and may never be a serious option.

Many traditional newspaper publishers plan to charge for online news and other material. Or maybe it would be more correct to say they hope to charge.

Online publishers mainly earn money from advertising. They say, with some justification, this doesn't generate enough revenue to pay for the teams of journalists and editors who produce online newspapers and magazines. It certainly doesn't deliver the 'rivers of gold' profits they enjoyed back in the heyday of newspaper publishing.

But publishers wishing to switch from an advertising revenue model to a charging model or a mixture of advertising and pay-to-read face an up-hill struggle.

For a start, only a small percentage of existing readers are willing to pay any money. Judging by what I've heard from the industry, publishers believe somewhere between one and 10 percent of existing readers would be willing to hand over money.

The number depends on many factors including the value of the material being offered. But most publishers who've tried this in the past have only managed to sell paid subscriptions to one or two percent of online readers.

How much does a single newspaper page cost?

Let's for argument's sake here agree that 10 percent of an online publication's existing readers would pay for content. Remember this number is higher than anyone appears to achieved to date.

This means in order for the pay wall to make as much money as the current advertising model each paying reader will have to contribute as much revenue as ten existing readers.

Online advertising is generally charged by the CPM (cost per thousand). Typically publishers can earn around $50 for every thousand page views (I'm using indicative numbers and not precise numbers). This is 5 cents per page view. Then to make the same money a single online page would cost 50 cents to read.

If publishers can only convert 2 percent of existing free readers into paying readers the single page price would rise to $2.50 – which is close to the A$3.50 The Australian Financial Review charges for each story.

Charging by the page for online newspapers

While billing users by the page to view online content may look attractive to publishers, it is not a cost-free transaction. The price of delivering a single web page to a browser is so small it is in effect negligible. The cost of adding a per page billing system to a site with ecommerce gateways, security and the pay wall technology is higher – though still small compared with the $2.50 fee calculated above.

However, that fee would only replace online advertising revenue. As Rupert Murdoch says, the existing revenue isn't enough to pay the bills, let alone make a profit.

On this basis the cost charged per page would need to rise to at least $3.00, but let's say for the sake of argument Murdoch needs to make $3.50 per sold online page to cover costs and keep his shareholders happy.

The micro-payment price is wrong

There's something wrong about charging readers US$3.50 to read a single online story, or for that matter the A$3.50 charged by the Australian Financial Review. It only costs $3.00 to buy a print edition of the newspaper, containing 64 or more tabloid pages. The physical newpaper is and edited by a large team, printed on dead trees, wrapped up and distributed across an entire continent to arrive at a local newsagent, who takes a 30 percent or so slice of the cover price.

It has at least 100 stories – usually plenty of really good reading – and vast amounts of valuable information. All for 50 cents less than the cost of a single online page that cost the AFR's publisher nothing to deliver to your screen.

Not only that, but the printed paper is your property for as long as you want. It's hard saving or downloading the AFR's online content – though you can print it out at your own cost – probably another 10 cents or so on top of the $3.50 you've already paid.

Similar logic applies to any other newspaper sold piecemeal online – it isn't  a sensible purchase. There are times when it makes sense to pay for the odd story, but over the long haul it is cheaper to buy the print edition.

In fact a subscription to the print edition is 20 percent cheaper than buying the paper each day directly from a newsagent, which makes purchasing stories online relatively more expensive.

What about digital subscriptions?

If buying online stories piecemeal doesn't make sense, what about digital subscriptions?

The model closest to home for me is The Australian Financial Review which charges A$75 a month for access to the digital edition only – that's the same price as a subscription to the print edition. Which from a reader point of view makes far more sense, but doesn't pass on any of the savings involved in not printing or distributing the physical paper.

Given the costs involved, the margins on this would be huge – which may cause resentment from readers, though probably not the well-heeled types who buy the AFR. But it's important to recognise the Financial Review covers a specialist niche and its readers can afford to pay a premium online – though by all accounts not many do. It would be  harder for a general newspaper to charge this kind of price.

It is clear after looking at the numbers that publishers will follow the subscription model for online content sales and not micro-payments and selling stories one-by-one. Maybe it'll work for Murdoch, after all, this is the man who convinced half the western world to pay for television – something that had previously been free. Yet there are other complications. As The Sydney Morning Herald points out Murdoch's claims that readers would be willing to pay for 'quality journalism' is, well, something of a talking point.

Also, there are privacy concerns about Murdoch's plans. As Wendy Davis explains at MediaPost, Murdoch wants to collect reader data – that's not a move to endear yourself to customers when you're about to hit them up with new charges.

As a journalist and editor, I've a vested interest in publishers finding ways to make readers pay for editorial. Unlike many I'm not in principle against the idea, I don't think it can work without major disruption and top-to-bottom reform of the entire publishing industry. Only a fool would dismiss Murdoch, he knows the media business inside out, but this could yet turn out to be News Corporation's Vietnam.  We'll know soon enough.

With the threat of viruses, corrupt files and long loading times, downloading music isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Bill Bennett reports.

This story originally appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald's Icon section on April 18 2003. (The SMH link is dead.) Some of the links at the bottom of this story may be dead.

You can’t buy the Oscar-winning movie Chicago on DVD yet, but if you know where to look you can download it from the internet. Similarly, fans who couldn’t make it to the recent Bruce Springsteen gig in Sydney can listen to an MP3 bootleg recording made elsewhere on the tour.

Everyone knows the internet has become a giant Aladdin’s cave packed with stolen treasure, but you might be surprised to learn just how much material there is. Just about every commercially recorded song is tucked away somewhere online.

Every imaginable popular media has been digitised, so you’ll find more besides music – from archived episodes of the BBC’s Dr Who TV series to 1940s American radio soap operas and scanned versions of the latest best-selling books. And, of course, there’s a huge trade in pirated software, and you can find the latest games and business applications online.

In almost every case, the files being traded are illegal copies. The authors, composers, filmmakers, programmers and musicians who created them are rarely, if ever, compensated when their work is downloaded. Consequently, many of the industries that depend on copyright for their revenue are hurting. According to the Business Software Association, some 37 per cent of all software in use is pirated. It claims this costs its members about $20 billion a year in lost income.

Peter Smith, a director of the Australian Music Retailers association and marketing director of HMV, says it is noticeable: local music industry sales were down 8.9 per cent in 2002 compared with the previous year.

“We don’t think file sharing is the whole story, but it is one factor behind the decline,” he says.

Smith believes that CD copying and burning is more of an issue for recorded music sales than people downloading and listening to music. “Look at the sales of blank CDRs [recordable CDs]; they’re phenomenal.”

It may be against the law, but file sharing appears to be unstoppable. Every time copyright owners develop a new technology designed to protect material from online piracy, someone learns how to bypass it. Even if they don’t, consumer pressure means anyone using the protection technology has difficulty selling their products.

Hardware companies are caught between a rock and a hard place. Copyright owners would like them to build protective measures into their equipment, but consumers don’t want this at all. In fact, when offered a choice they simply won’t generally buy protected hardware. Just ask anyone buying a DVD player whether they prefer a regional player or a multi-regional one.

At the same time, sales of CD and DVD burners have rocketed. It’s widely recognised in the computer industry that file sharing is one of the few justifications consumers have to upgrade their hardware or move to a broadband internet connection. The money being made on the back of the file-sharing boom might even be greater than the amount lost by copyright owners.

Research reveals that file sharing is now widespread. According to some estimates, up to 70 per cent of all the communications’ bandwidth used by US university students is taken up by people swapping media files.

Last month, in a story headlined “Internet file-sharing bigger than the music industry”, The San Jose Mercury reported that 61 million Americans regularly download free music. That’s about half the online population. Just one file-swapping program, the Australian-owned KaZaA, is said to have 4.2 million registered users and there are at least a dozen worthwhile alternatives.

Jason Ross, who tracks Australian technology trends for AMR Interactive, found in a recent survey that 17 per cent of all internet users claimed to have downloaded a music file in the past seven days. The same survey found 91 per cent of all Australian online users are familiar with downloading files from the net.

The sheer volume of file sharing is causing huge problems for network adminstrators. A small industry has emerged, selling the tools used by managers to limit the amount of file-sharing traffic going through corporate networks.

One way the industry has fought back against file sharers is to seed the online services with dummy or dodgy material. You might spend the best part of a day, and a considerable slice of your monthly download allowance, grabbing a particular movie only to find you have 180 minutes of rubbish. It’s not unusual for a song file to be filled with obscenities or other noxious noises. A lot of pirated software is virus infected.

Another danger is the spyware and other commercial junk installed on your computer by file-sharing software (see Infofile). Getting rid of it can be a nightmare.

File sharing is even more popular today than it was when the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) used its considerable legal firepower to close the Napster network in 2001. This triggered the rise of true peer-to-peer swapping services.

Peer-to-peer file swapping takes place when two computers link directly to each other. They may use a third computer to set up the connection, but once the link is made the material travels directly from one machine to another.

Napster routed all connections through a central point, but current systems do away with this altogether. This is smart thinking because the recording industry managed to close Napster’s central servers down and then bankrupt the company. With the newer services there’s no-one to prosecute.

By killing Napster the recording industry won an important battle, but it lost the war. Since then, the cost of storage – usually on a hard disk – has dropped by a factor of 10. Today’s hard disks are 10 times the size and the amount of consumer bandwidth in use has climbed by a factor of 10.

Guess what all that extra capacity is used for?

Infofile: Many popular file-sharing clients load spyware and other software nasties on your computer. These programs report on your computing activity, trigger ads to appear and reroute your browser to commercial web sites. After testing a dozen programs, we used Ad-Aware 6 and found more than 120 suspicious items.

Choosing a network

To test the networks we searched for five multimedia files: three music tracks, a movie and an ancient music video. The networks were all tested using an Ozemail ADSL connection. Where there was a choice of client programs we chose the best performer.

Our test music files were in decreasing order of obscurity: Delta Goodrem’s Born to Try, Oasis’s Wonderwall and Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ There, There, My Dear. You can usually find the last track in most large record stores, but getting it online proved much harder.

At first we tried finding the new Ned Kelly movie, but ran into confusion because of earlier films with a similar name. So we ended up looking for Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. To save bandwidth we downloaded only the first 30MB in order to check we had the right movie, though one program downloaded the lot. We chose Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody as the pop video, mainly because it is popular enough to be sought after without being too easy to find.

eDonkey

***

eMule

There are two main eDonkey clients, but eMule worked the best. It took a few minutes to find Wonderwall and Lord of the Rings. Queen and Delta Goodrem took a few tries. eMule drew a complete blank on Dexy’s Midnight Runners.

Downloading can be frustrating; you often have to wait for days. Curiously, eMule sometimes starts downloading big files from the middle, which makes it hard to check you have the right one. It took three days to download the two found songs. It might actually have taken less but we got bored checking. By the end of the first week we had a few bits of the movie and the video but were a long way from home on both.

WinMX

****½

The most popular file-sharing program was clearly the best at finding files. We located all five in less than two minutes. No rival came close. Downloading was less successful. We had two songs in under 10 minutes, the Queen video took about 30 minutes, but the Dexy’s song took almost two days to arrive. We had some trouble downloading the movie. Eventually we left the system on overnight and woke to find the file sitting there in the morning.

In use, the WinMX program can be daunting for beginners and there are few help files or documentation. However, there are many good third-party FAQs and tutorials online.

FastTrack

*½

Grokster

At least three different client programs will connect you to the FastTrack network. They all assault your computer with pop-up advertising, spyware programs that report your online activities to marketing forms and other annoyances.

Grokster is no better than the others and it loaded at least three dodgy programs onto the test computer. The collateral junk even managed to crash Windows XP, which takes some doing. KaZaA Lite is supposed to avoid these problems, but it didn’t perform very well in our tests.

FastTrack has another trap – some clients limit the bit rate of your downloads – so you generally only find poor quality files. Grokster managed to locate the test files within 30 minutes, downloading took less than six hours. However, the price of this is far too high. We recommend you steer clear of Grokster and KaZaA.

Gnutella

***

Shareaza

You’ll find a number of Gnutella clients to choose from. Some have spyware. We choose Shareaza because it didn’t. Although it was by far the easiest program to use in the entire test, the Gnutella network offered the smallest collection of files. In our test it couldn’t find the Dexy’s song and took a few hours to track down the Queen video. Once it found a file, the download would start more or less straight away.

Others

In addition to the four popular networks above, we also tried DirectConnect and Blubster. DirectConnect is hard to use, doesn’t offer many files and requires you to share (read pirate) vast amounts of data before you can join. We had difficulty getting the Blubster software to work on the test system. Taking an alternative approach, we also searched on IRC and through the various MP3 newsgroups for our test file list. Although both technologies offer many files, finding specific songs through these routes can be extremely hard work.

Verdict

If you must go down this route, WinMX is the best way to hunt down files, but it isn’t necessarily the best way to download them. Gnutella and eDonkey are viable alternatives. The FastTrack network does the job, but the overhead is too high.

My name is Bill Bennett. But then you already knew that.

I'm a freelance journalist living in Auckland, New Zealand.

For about half of the time I work as the New Zealand editor for Communications Day.

The rest of my time is available for freelance writing.

People often hire me to tackle difficult writing jobs. Most of my clients are in Australia and New Zealand, but I can work for anyone, anywhere.

Most of the time I write journalism: news and features. I also take on commercial writing jobs – company profiles, case studies and marketing communications writing. I've also been a ghost writer for many senior executives.

I've written for many newspapers and magazines including: The Sydney Morning Herald, The Melbourne Age, The Australian Financial Review, New Zealand Reseller News, PC Magazine, The Australian Net Guide, The Dominion, The Evening Post (now The Dominion Post). If you're still interested you can read a formal profile.

Am I the Bill Bennett you were looking for?