The death of Louis XIV. was announced by captain of bodyguard from a window of state apartment. Raising his truncheon above his head, he broke it in centre, and throwing pieces among crowd, exclaimed in a loud voice, "Le Roi est mort!" Then seizing another staff, he flourished it in air as he shouted, "Vive le Roi!" —Pardoe: Life of Louis XIV., vol. iii. p. 457.

Now I'll be first to admit that I'm not captain of bodygaurd for Advertising, so task of announcing death of advertising is not among my responsibilities. Nor is finding a successor to throne. No, I do less glorious task of search engine marketing. I'm quietly on sidelines as Dot Bomb after Dot Gone pass by in a funeral procession that seems endless. The parade route marching to funeral dirge and drum, glumly trudging through streets to mark passing of online royalty on a weekly basis.

This week we bow our heads in honor of passing of another advertising-reliant giant, HomeStore.com. Before that it was WebVan and WebMD and Wine.com -- I'm starting at bottom of a very long alphabetical list you can see yourself at:

http://www.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/dotcomlayoffs.htm

The deathmarch itself has been analyzed-to-death by everyone from network news anchors to newspaper commentators and pundits. I won't burden us with another perspective here other than to say that it's big business that has it all wrong in a twisted attempt to apply old models to a new medium. I wonder why it is that each new technology is constantly wedged into wrong shape hole because that is "where money is".

When television was first developed, we didn't know what to do with it because advertising was not so ubiquitous. We had print advertising in magazines and radio advertisement ruled air- waves. But everyone agreed that television was worthless . . .

In a 2nd Circuit Court decision last year, six freelance writers won a case against New York Times, Newsday and Time for copyright infringement. Their work was re-sold as digital content on a CDROM and later published on web.

Their claim that they did NOT relicense their work for use on web or in digital compilations and were entitled to compensation when that content was re-sold was accepted by court in a judgement against original publishers of that content.

Many writers online offer their articles "Free" for use on web, in ezines or in ebooks available online. But in fact are being paid by publishers by requiring that "resource boxes" be used, such as four line blurb following this article. This is, in fact, a form of payment and is agreed to by those writers in exchange for traffic, publicity, subscriptions and exposure gained when readers visit authors web site, subscribe to their ezine or see advertise- ments run for a fee on their web site.

"Content" is proliferating, professional "paid" writers work is becoming less valuable online and some professionals are shouting, "ENOUGH! We want to be paid for our work!"