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The Internet has permanently changed the dynamics of multimedia discovery and acquisition. In the past, there existed constraints on books, music, and video via price, location, and time: items went out of print, or were available only in certain geographic areas, or the cost of purchase was high due to excessive intermediation and lack of competition.
Those constrains have mostly disappeared. It's not a stretch to say that most intellectual property is now instantly available for acquisition by consumers, regardless of location or publication date, and at a relatively cheap cost (often as low as zero).
In a world where virtually everything is permanently and cheaply available, the meaning of old and new changes from absolute to relative. An item is no longer new when its author releases it. Instead, it becomes new every time another person comes across it for the first time. Which might be days, weeks, or years after the item was created.
The fact that there's an infinite stream of new people being born and coming online everyday also implies that nothing is ever old or obsolete except, pehaps, based on intrinsic merit versus its peers.
As such, the value of a review is not dependent on closeness to the date of an item's release. Instead, value is purely a function of how many other articles with similar viewpoints already exist. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the more information that's available on a given topic, the less valuable an additional article becomes, and viceversa.
A couple of examples clearly show how value is completely independent of time. For an obscure old series like Visions of Space, where virtually no online reviews exist, publishing a single article makes a big positive difference. Whereas for a contemporary mainstream topic with lots of online information such as Mad Men, publishing one more viewpoint has almost zero long-term value.
Bottom line: if you have unique knowledge or opinion about a topic, and there are few or no articles on the Internet with a similar viewpoint, I urge you to write something up and post it online. The more obscure and unpopular the subject, the better. Someone, somewhere, someday, will find your article, and be grateful. Guaranteed.
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