During the week of non-blogging I had several interesting discussions about neo-conservatives. One was prompted by a friend’s blurb on the changing perception of United States in Russia. According to a recent returnee from St. Pete, in a social setting, Russians are ultimately predicting a quick demise of US political and economic domination, not triggered by Russia or the EU, but in some respect promoted by the inefficiency of US domestic policy. Russians perceive US foreign policy as the direct consequence of the financial woes on the home front, and, obviously, offer no immediate solutions.

Yet, current foreign policy was shaped not during the downturn, but in the top of the boom in the late nineties. See here. In light of this, Europeans feel that US is trying to dominate the global political scene; Russians, being a bit more terminal in their assessment, are waiting for these efforts to crumble under their own weight. I suppose that’s a relic from the Soviet-days bipolar world.

I was in Mexico over the weekend, which practically precluded me from blogging. Of course, there were Internet cafes and other types of access points (e.g. hotel rooms), but the cost seemed to be prohibitive in the extreme. Even with typing 60-70 words per minute, the cost of making a blog entry would have run into dollar figures. Which, of course, is counterintuitive from the perspective of a blogger.

Overall, the fact that blogging from Mexico would have cost me more than blogging from the US, brings out a new dimension to the "information wants to be free" mantra. While more often applied to information consumption, from the perspective of blogging, it reverses to content generation. Obviously, there should be no direct cost associated with providing information that wants to be consumed by others. Quite to the contrary, there should be some remuneration for delivering an information service.

The argument against this can be, of course, that there are always indirect costs associated with content production (and higher costs associated with information distribution), but what is interesting here is the perception of the costs as the context changes. That said, blogging from the US, at least by someone sitting on a DSL connection at $39/month, is perceived to be "free", while the cost for blogging from an Internet cafe in Mexico, at $4-5/hour, can hardly be seen as marginal.

I suppose it's all back to contextual pricing (the cost of espresso on Piazza San Marco vs. the nearest Starbucks).