Cheryll,

It is a shame your blog does not allow comments, because that might be an easier place to have this conversation!  I cannot disagree with anything you say in your reply – it is plausible support for how you might create a keiretsu cooperative.  My issue, however, is not how one might do this, rather why one would do it – or rather why one would do it to create a “publishing and discussion site designed to attract the indie writers we call bloggers”.

One of  the consequences of the separation of information from distribution is that the information then tends to live in digital spaces rather than digital places.  For example, you didn’t come to my blog (digital place) to find my piece on Gutenberg and the social media revolution – you found it “out there” in digital space.  My article lives in a Google search (which is a space) much more than it lives in my blog and its visibility in this space is determined by how people have shared or distributed this article within their own digital spaces not by how many have come to my blog to find it.

In reality, the concept of information living in, or being published by a “site” is dissolving as, indeed, is the idea that there is any collective interest (monetary or otherwise) in the act of publication.  However, there is an emerging collective interest in the act of information sharing and thus there may well be relevance in the concept of  a community (or site) to share information.

Thus, my advice to you would be to take your work on creating a kieretsu coopoerative, which remains relevant, and apply it instead to the act of information sharing, rather than the act of information publication.  There is no longer money to be made in publication, because publication costs nothing.

(Also note: by ‘walled garden’ I did not mean pay-walled garden.  The walls are there to stop the information getting out, not to prevent people getting in.)

Happy to continue the discussion.