Who actually pays for all that content?

Gripe Line: What with InfoWorld and other publications forging ahead into the world beyond print, Ed Foster raises the question about who pays for content — and readers respond with some interesting thoughts. One concern was that aggregators such as Google and Yahoo pluck ad revenue without producing content. One less-than-optimistic site visitor wrote, “what I know to be true is that if there is no one investigating, gathering, sorting out fact from fiction, and if all the sources are just relying on each other, then democracy as we know it will no longer exist.”

From the feature well: “The process of tracking down every piece of valuable company data — and applying the appropriate tools to shield information from unwanted access or misuse — remains in its beginning stages,” writes Matt Hines in The struggle to protect enterprise data. The heart of the matter is visibility and, of course, blind spots. The good news? According to one analyst, “people are recognizing the problem.” Retail giant Sears is but one example.

Careers: He’s said it before and, in all likelihood, will repeat it more than once again. “One of the things that is your job, and that you must never shirk, delegate or otherwise avoid, is to set the tone,” John West explains in this Leading from the Trenches post. Aimed at new leaders specifically, other tips include making a big push versus dribbling over time, being sensitive to change and when doing it the hard way is a must.

Notes from the field: Robert X. Cringely has a new nickname of sorts for Microsoft: The hole enchilada. “And people say Redmond has forgotten how to innovate,” he writes, referring to a massive underground parking garage, four stories deep and four football fields long. Dubbed Microsoft Live Parking 1.0 by Cringe, who reports that it will be the second largest underground lot in the western hemisphere. “Soil removal is slated to be done by October, however sources say Microsoft is finding plenty of bugs in it, which may delay the lot’s official launch until sometime in 2012.”