Last night, I made chocolate babycakes.

I had seen Nigella Lawson’s recipe in the Times two weeks ago… I even ripped it out. But I lost the clipping and went back online to print out it. Alas, they wanted $3.95 to access it: Two Paths to Glory: Smashing Desserts – Free Preview. (The free preview is a paragraph).

Ever resourceful, I did a google search and found, gasp, 39,000 matches, including the entire recipe.

The key to charging for content is a limited number of channels or a secure "locking"  mechanism. The web offers neither. As people get better at searching (and they do, every day), the chances that you can charge for nuggets of non-custom information go down, relentlessly.

PS I wonder why I don’t feel like I stole the recipe…

…If I hadn’t lost the clipping, I certainly wouldn’t have been stealing. And those 39,000 recipes didn’t all come from Nigella… I wonder where Nigella got her version?

As you can guess, my blog inspires a bunch of mail. Lately, some correspondents have been interpreting my musings about innovation adoption as being related to frustration with the take up of Squidoo. I just wanted to post a tiny post to let you know that the opposite is true.

We’re learning a ton about what people want and how ideas spread, which I’ve been trying to share here. But the number of lenses (10,000) and the traffic and most of all the quality of what’s being built is running approximately 800% ahead of what we were hoping for. Keep up with the SquidBlog.