Link: http://www.etc-architect.com/?p=281
From ETC-Architect
The FUTON I am after here is not the Japanese mattress, but the ‘Full text on net’ bias. FUTON is the tendency of academics to base their research solely on information free of charge on the internet. Often the opposite is called ‘toll access publications’.
Now in architecture there is similar trend to be seen. Traditionally most sources quote in architectural design if at all where analyst reports. Since more business stakeholders want some collaboration that what the architect is proposing has actually been referenced at other places and most architects are not given any budget for this the FUTON bias is the logical outcome.
The real problem with FOTON is that the majority of architecture work is ignored, including all the intelligent work beyond search walls (such as information published in LinkedIn Groups). The other problem is that this is relatively easy to manipulate as most companies will not offer any FUTON, as they want at least the email of the person accessing their research or white papers which are excluded from FUTON, so instead often architecture is built on blogs like mine and as such only on a very little sample of the available information. However in the long run if FUTON stays as strong as it is today most new ideas will be published without any subscription model and as such any commercialisation of architecture reference material can only function by making it part of commercial software (as they are still paid for as there is a budget).
