savvy business

Last week, many of the Web's most influential developers and designers converged on a seemingly unremarkable art space (née factory for novelty invisible dog leashes) in Brooklyn for the first of what I hope will become a long-standing conference tradition: Brooklyn Beta.

It's no secret that I'm pretty skeptical of the longterm viability of just about any newspaper paywall. Among the "success stories," however, many people point to the Financial Times, which has a policy of only letting unregistered users see a single story per month before locking them out.

If you register (still free) you get ten stories per month. After that you have to pay (or you erase your cookies, or use Google searches, since you can get access if you come via Google).