I’m building http://tweetminer.net and–although I’ll always have a free plan–it won’t be very long before I introduce premium subscription plans at around $5 – $10 per month.

I may get 1 paying subscriber–I may get 10,000 paying subscribers–who knows?

What I do know is, no matter how much (or how little) money TweetMiner makes, I can’t help but feel it isn’t very fair I can build a revenue generating business on your dime.

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On Wednesday, a startup called OnLive that’s generating a lot of buzz–and skepticism–in the videogame world raised a new round of financing from AT&T (T), Warner Bros. and others. We spoke to OnLive founder Steve Perlman, a well-known serial entrepreneur, about the investment (which wasn’t quantified) and some of the implications if OnLive or startups like it are successful.

OnLive has developed technology that it says will allow consumers to play graphically rich videogames without owning high-end PCs or consoles like the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 that are normally required for such titles. Instead, OnLive plans to run games on powerful remote servers in data centers and pipe high-definition game graphics over the Internet to consumers, who can play them on low-end PCs and Macs or through an inexpensive OnLive device connected to their televisions.

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When newspaper executives met in Chicago last week to discuss new business models for the industry, they expected to hear from Steve Brill about his well-publicized venture to charge for online content. But the executives were surprised by a last-minute addition to their agenda: Alan Mutter, a veteran newspaper editor and entrepreneur widely known as the Newsosaur.

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Tragic events unfolded yesterday as a group of British skiers became separated from two of their party in the Swiss resort of Verbier. The rescue operation took on a global perspective when members of the party–a group of U.K. technology entrepreneurs–used the microblogging site Twitter in trying to locate the missing skiers. Despite the concerted efforts of the online community and the mountain rescue teams, developments which were instantly relayed on Twitter, one of the skiers, co-founder of Dolphin Music Rob Williams, died in the incident.

The sad events have highlighted the ways in which online and mobile tools can be harnessed to help travelers in emergency situations. A Twitter update by one of the group, trying to find the mobile number of the second stranded skier, Dolphin Music co-founder Jason Tavaria, was re-tweeted across the site. In the following hours, a combination of GPS, Google Maps and signals returned from his iPhone may well have helped save his life–Tavaria was found alive by mountain rescue.

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They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece–not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

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TheFunded, a site that lets entrepreneurs rate and comment about venture capitalists, has drawn a lot of attention from folks eager to learn salacious gossip about bad VCs.

Over recent months, though, there’s been an odd development: Certain posts by entrepreneurs critical of VCs are being quietly removed and then replaced with more favorable comments. On its face, it looks like a whitewash. Or maybe it’s not so troubling. You decide.

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Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo is something that has been rumored for a long time, but it’s really the first of many more consolidation steps for the computer industry. Every new industry starts with a few crazy innovators, who are followed by thousands of entrepreneurs engaged in a fierce Darwinian competition. Some of those entrepreneurs build large companies, but as the new industry that has been created matured, few of them make it to the finish line.

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Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo is something that has been rumored for a long time, but it’s really the first of many more consolidation steps for the computer industry. Every new industry starts with a few crazy innovators, who are followed by thousands of entrepreneurs engaged in a fierce Darwinian competition. Some of those entrepreneurs build large companies, but as the new industry that has been created matured, few of them make it to the finish line.

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Recently I produced a CD. It was independently recorded and distributed–and it was available for free on every peer-to-peer service on the planet weeks before it was officially released, so it was only a modest commercial success.

Don’t feel bad. It was entirely expected. Even if there was such a thing as a record industry anymore, no one would expect a double-disc tribute to a 27-year-old album by The Clash to keep Avril or Pink from the top of the charts. But there’s one reaction the record has received that has helped me understand something about the broader media business: the danger of looking backward.

Back when I started the project in 2003, I was delusional enough to think I could get someone else to fund it. I spoke to executives at large multinational record companies and small independent companies, and they all told me, with varying degrees of politeness, to get lost. A few told me it was a crazy idea, a few more told me it was a bad idea and some told me, with that level of snideness only record-company executives can manage, that I’d never finish the project.

But when the record came out, I heard from several record-company executives. Some of them just wanted free copies, some wanted to offer me mild kudos and almost all of them–including one who had rejected the record back in 2003 but forgotten–asked me some version of “Why didn’t you come to us so we could have put this out?”

Aside from reminding me that some people in the record industry view memory loss as a core competency, this reversal in my fortune now that I could no longer do anything about it gave me a clue to where the media industry is right now. Around the same time the record came out, the founder of a dot-com magazine that crashed and burned reminisced with me about an email newsletter I started while the ashes of that magazine were still warm. The newsletter failed, too, in large part because in 2002 online advertising had fallen off a cliff and hit the bottom of the canyon a la Wile E. Coyote. “If you started that now,” he said, “It would be a big success.”

Perhaps. But I don’t have to start it now. The media and technology businesses are now different than they were in 2002 and 2003. When I started the online newsletter in 2002, no one else was dumb enough to try that. Now it seems as if everyone has at least a semipro blog. When I started soliciting performers for the record in 2003, no one else was stupid enough to try and assemble 36 performers to redo–for free!–a long-forgotten record. Now tribute albums are all the rage. Is it just that I have uncannily bad commercial timing?

It is true that I would have an easier time funding something now than four to five years ago. Everyone else is. Indeed, as uncov and others report so gleefully, moronic ideas are getting funded again, while five years ago even a recipe for eternal life might have had trouble scoring a meeting on Sand Hill Road.

But the response I received should make entrepreneurs–and the people who fund them–wary. In both the case of the record and the email newsletter, I was told by experts that something I did at a different time would be successful now. Wrong! If I merely updated or replicated an old idea, it would still be an old idea. But today’s business environment is all about innovation. At its best, it’s about the next thing, not a redo of the last thing. The start-ups most likely to fail are the retreads, the wannabes, the copycats, the ones that mistake features for full-fledged services.

Look at the record industry if you want to see what happens to an industry that reflexively looks backward for ideas. Know your history but don’t be limited by it. At their best, media and technology are about the new. If you had an old idea that people like, say thank you. But, if you want success, keep that old idea where it is and come up with something fresh.