aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Free
[First, a news flash! My book will be previewed as the cover story in Wired this month. Out in about ten days. Link then. I think you’ll like it
]
- Kevin Kelly has been on tear of great writing/thinking about free, including this delightful rhapsody on eight new scarcities created by free (remember: every abundance creates a new scarcity), and this, on how technology “wants to be free”.
- Another great thinker/writer about free is Techdirt’s Mike Masnick. If you haven’t subscribed to his feed, you should. Start here.
- Tim O’Reilly’s TOC conference, now underway, has spurred the book industry to announce some modest experiments in free, such as limited versions of free online books and selling books by the chapter. Harper Collins is taking the lead, including free books by Paulo Coelho and Neil Gaiman. The idea is that these are “samplers” that will drive sales of older books. This is all good, but it’s just a start...
- Q: Does Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo stem from the company’s fear that Office is competing with free? (A: No. But I appreciate the suggestion that free productivity software in now a mainstream idea anyway...)
- Whoops! Glenn Fleishman reminds me that the biggest free news of the day is actually Starbucks switching to free WiFi for people who use the Starbucks cards. [My excuse for the miss: I’m an Verizon Evdo junkie, even though it’s anything but free, and I don’t use WiFi in public spaces anymore]
SEE ALSO: Computing in the Cloud.
