Without open source software, trillions of work hours would be wasted each month across the globe solving problems which have already been well solved in the past by others. This adds economic benefit to everyone involved in IT, and to businesses generally.

I used to work on building content management systems which cost north of a quarter of a million dollars for each client. WordPress now makes a better project cost in the low thousands. This is good for all parties and results in more efficient work and sees money spent on things which add more value.

I could go on about how powerful open-source software is. But I think the point is clear!

I’ve often wondered, though, why it’s only nerds which seem to have embraced the open-source approach. Why isn’t it done in marketing?

Or law? Talk about an industry which looks to repeatedly solve the same problem over and over. And for $300 an hour at that.

Well, today Startmate, an Australian incubator and supporter of online businesses open-sourced their legal documents.

What an awesome thing to do for entrepreneurs across Australia.

For any small online business, there’s significant cost in setting up these documents. Now most of the heavy lifting has been done for them by providing a clean, well structured set of documents from which to start working on.

I bet they had many folks suggesting otherwise. But they did it.

And by doing so, it means a solved-problem is available to more people for less cost. So dollars can be spent on things which aren’t yet solved.

Well done Startmate. Big respect. From actions, not words.

What’s your background in media?

I have been in the advertising, publishing and media industry both here and overseas for over 25 years – straight from school. I started as a media planner/buyer in full service agencies – and then jumped the fence to advertising sales.

I have enjoyed various roles at BRW/Fairfax and News. In 2000 I was on maternity leave from Fairfax and looking for something to do for a few hours each day. I moonlighted doing some ad sales for a small start-up site – Essential Baby – and stayed until the sale to Fairfax Digital 7 years later – it felt very full-circle indeed.

Since leaving Essential Baby/Fairfax over 3 years ago I have been consulting businesses in the development of their advertising sales & revenue strategy. Everything from media kits to rate structure/forecasting to defining their market position.

Many media owners recognise that advertising is not their core expertise though it can be a key revenue source. They use my services to develop some or all of this publisher-to-advertiser segment of their business.

I also do some contract advertising sales training, various special projects and produce articles such as Digital People on media trade site Digital Ministry.

In the last 18 months I have launched an advertising directory – MediaScope. We are now the most comprehensive resource of niche, alternative and emerging advertising options in the Australian market with over 2,500 listings – and we’re growing fast. We are also realising several tailored extensions to our core directory service.

What’s the elevator pitch behind MediaScope?

MediaScope was launched to solve a deepening problem in the media trading landscape. We’re an advertising directory which connects buyers and sellers focusing on the often hard to find, constantly evolving and highly effective ‘long tail’ or ‘beyond mainstream’ end of the market. Very simply our aim is to ‘aggregate increasing advertising choice’.

What’s the number one problem facing the buy side in media in Australia?

I think there are several problems facing the buy side. From my perspective it is the problem of missing opportunities to reach their – or their clients – market. The media landscape is fragmenting and changing so quickly – advertisers, marketers and sme’s are too time and resource poor to ensure they are seeing – and assessing – all the options which are increasingly available to reach their audiences.

There is no doubt ad buyers have almost too much choice for their advertising spend and if anything this over-supply has led some buyers – particularly large media agencies- to reduce the number of media suppliers they trade with and increase their focus to the ‘usual suspects’ or low hanging fruit options. If I was a client I would be concerned about this.

What’s the number one problem facing the sell side in media in Australia?

Again – many problems. From my MediaScope perspective it is in two parts – firstly building their story for advertising buyers and secondly finding an effective story teller.

I see many media owners with a great deal of potential to either generate or increase some level of revenue through advertising. Their challenge is to develop strategies and tactics to communicate (more) effectively to potential advertising buyers.

The second part to this is having a highly effective story teller – it’s all very well to have a great story but you need someone to tell it.

Not only is it a very tight market to find good advertising sales people, sometimes even getting through the door to see advertising buyers can be the biggest problem facing the sell side – particularly if you are media in the niche, alternative and emerging end of the market ie not the ‘usual suspects’ or low hanging fruit.

How do you help each side out?

Good question! I can help both buyers and sellers in many ways both through the MediaScope advertising directory and also through a growing range of tailored one-on-one services.

Firstly MediaScope provides a comprehensive, free and easy to use central resource to connect advertising buyers and sellers – with a specific focus on beyond mainstream niche, alternative and emerging media options.

We also offer a growing range of one-on-one services such as advertising sales & revenue consultancy – and a media planning service where we help buyers, marketers and agencies identify and qualify new media options based on their specific briefs.

Just the other day an agency rang wanting to reach teachers – I was able to very quickly point them directly to candidate media options which was not on their radar.

The basic argument goes that by forcing people to pay for your content, you will lose a massive percentage of your audience. But the hope is that the people you have left will contribute more revenue than what the website was getting prior to the paywall being erected. (The metric of online revenue, CPMs, is only going lower and lower.)

There is one consequence that may not have been considered, however: attracting talented writers.

The paywall is neutering the impact of comment writers.

In the area we know a lot about, rugby, it is fascinating to see that Stephen Jones, who was once in the news about once a week around the world for his opinions, making him a leading figure in the sport, has now disappeared without a trace. He writes for The Times.

His voice has become irrelevant because no-one can read his writing. It can’t be linked to or easily cited. It’s effectively muted his voice. And for a journist to be muted, this is a hefty blow. Journalists write because they have a burning desire to be heard.

How long before journalists start either demanding more compensation; or moving to competitive organisations which aren’t behind paywalls? How hard will it be to hire the best talent now their writing is behind a paywall?

So while losing international traffic referred from Google is no great shakes in the greater scheme of revenue-things, losing the voice and influence of the journalists is.

I wonder how Murdoch will respond to this growing problem.

Australian publisher Conversant Media .. offers the popular Conversant Mobile “white-label” iPhone application development tool for bloggers who want a stylish, flexible way to display their blog content. Popular trend blogs such as Lost at E Minor and tech blogs such as Mashable and Techcrunch have long been available in iPhone app form.

Conversant Mobile’s features include automatic content updates from your CMS (rare!), multimedia-ready (one-tap Youtube viewing), local search and local data storage (fast) and synchronised content (efficient).

> Visit Conversant Mobile for a full list of our iPhone app features and demos

Nice to see Lost at E Minor keeping the esteemed company of Mashable and Techcrunch in Businessweek’s roundup of popular blogs too!

“For both men and women (36.1% and 32.7%, respectively) the Web is the go-to for sports news, which is followed by local TV programming (23.7%), national TV networks (15.1%), local newspapers (6.7%), national newspapers (3.6%), and sports radio (2.9%).

This trend is particularly prevalent among the important 18-24 and 25-34 age segments, as we’ve seen in action with our Sports Opinion website, The Roar, which has been steadily growing its traffic over the past twelve months.

Not much needs to be said; suffice to say there doesn’t seem to be the same divide between church and state (editorial and advertising) that there once was.

Back in the day, there’d be no way the lead article in the newspaper would match exactly the massive ad campaign also running.

Even if the lead article as determined by the editors happened to match the site sponsor, they wouldn’t have run it to avoid the perception that there was an editorial conflict.

Not anymore.

Click on the images to see what I mean.