Reading the scoop on RedPaper, a new venture backed by some impressive folks who ought to know better, brought back memories of the Internet boom: i.e., What are they thinking? Perhaps it's just me, but the idea seems DOA. People who have something interesting to say, something worth paying for, don't need a content aggregator like RedPaper to get their thoughts published. They just publish their work on the web. They blog. Good writers are their own brands, and they don't need to borrow whatever brand cache RedPaper hopes to build. I also don't know why readers would believe that the quality of RedPaper's articles would exceed whatever they could find for free on Google. The idea doesn't seem viable from either the prospective author's or reader's point of view.

Then again, I used to think the concept of "portals" was idiotic too.