Could an Open Platform cabal save publishing?

The launch of The Guardian’s Open Platform is an interesting move to create a network beyond their own capabilities / audience. By opening up their content and data to be used by third party developers they then plan to then sell / serve ads against the resulting applications / audience.

Its a great idea and as a fan of data and its creative applications I can’t wait to see what will come out of it. But as a fan of publishing I wonder what it portends for that industry as a whole? If a number if publishers embraced the Guardian’s approach and pooled the resulting content and data? They’d be of interest to a larger number of developers and hence a larger audience.  If they then layered an ad sales network over the top so they have better targeting of brands against audiences you’d effectively have the same result as the scenario David Carr painted earlier this month in the New York Times. However it would be embracing the inevitable changes wrought by technology and collectively freeing content and data rather than Carr’s rather blinkered vision of locking it down further. There’s no doubt there are some serious problems with the current business model of newspapers but Carr’s ‘dream’ approach of denial is hardly the solution.

To paraphrase John Gilmore: “The Internet interprets censorship legislation as damage and routes around it.” Right or wrong the music industry’s travails have proven this to be the case. All of us in the creative industries are going to need to think in 360 degrees to explot our creativity. The Guardian’s decision to innovate their way out of this nightmare has to be applauded ahead of any retrograde dream publishers may have of legislating their way out.