Free: the "takedown" debate, and more future of news....

It's all here today in the NYT.

Free is also the subject of new book by Wired editor Chris Anderson, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” which got its first big review this week, by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker, a media moment that’s provided much entertainment to observers.

“It’s always fun when one popular idea popularizer goes after another popular idea popularizer,” says Paul Kredosky.

At the Awl, Chorie Sicha said, “It’s like War of the Speaker’s Bureaus.” To which Tom Socca replied: “MOTHRA V. MOTHRA.”

What many liked about Gladwell’s review was that it was a “takedown” of Anderson’s book, and in these troubled times, such things are need to put a little vim back in the vigor of old media enthusiasts.

And there's a good take on this from Fred Wilson too.

...the Internet allows an entrrepreneur to enter a market with a free offering because the costs of doing so are not astronomical. And most entrpreneurs who take this approach will maintain an attractive free offering of their basic service forever. But that doesn't mean that everything they offer will be free. That's the whole point of freemium. Free gets you to a place where you can ask to get paid. But if you don't start with free on the Internet, most companies will never get paid.

Free, free stuff - lots of it...

From the first UK review I've seen of Chris Anderson's Free. I wonder if it will have the impact of the Long Tail? Anyway, here's a bit of the Observer review from the Deputy Editor of The Economist.

Free observes an interesting phenomenon, but doesn't take the reader far beyond the notion that there's a lot of free stuff about. It pulls together information about current trends and is dotted with abstruse bits of learning - divergent views of competition among 18th-century French mathematicians, for instance - which seem to be there more to lend the book intellectual heft than to strengthen its arguments. But it doesn't have the weight of a fully worked-through idea. It ends not with a discussion of where this trend is leading but with "50 business models built on free", presumably addressed to the businessmen who may be attending Anderson's speeches on the subject.

More once read, of course. Free at Amazon.

An interesting file share move by Friendfeed?

Friendfeed added yet another feature to its short social messaging service that you won’t find on Twitter: the ability to share MP3s and other files directly within your feed.

From Wired.
Isn't this something of a political move? Bret Taylor, co-founder of Friendfeed told Wired the plan :

...is to respond to infringement complaints as is required by the DMCA (by removing infringing content from the site after being notified by a content owner) and by terminating repeat infringers’ accounts. It’s unclear how copyright holders would even know anything’s being infringed, given Friendfeed’s privacy options.

Found via Lisa Gold's Research Blog: Bezos is 'kind of am grumpy' reading a physical book

I kind of am grumpy when I am forced to read a physical book. Because it’s not as convenient. Turning the pages … I didn’t know this either, until I started using the Kindles a couple months ago, I mean a couple years ago, I didn’t understand all of the failings of a physical book, because I’m inured to them. But you can’t turn the page with one hand. The book is always flopping itself shut at the wrong moment. They’re heavy. You can only take one or two of them with you at a time. It’s had a great 500-year run. [Audience laughter.] It’s an unbelievably successful technology. But it’s time to change.

Thanks to Lisa Gold, who adds: "This quote was transcribed by Carolyn Kellogg in the LA Times’ Jacket Copy blog from a video of Bezos in conversation with Steven Levy at Wired’s Disruptive by Design conference."


The in conversation:

Ok Harvey, it's like Bonfire of the Vanities meets, ah, Hackers

Love World of Warcraft? And Hubris? Read this Wired piece now.

...And he played the game. You could call it solace: a way to fill the emptiness of failure with the curiously convincing sense of purpose that comes from steadily amassing a make-believe digital fortune in magic staves and platinum coins. But in time it would be more than that. Much more. Soon enough, amid the daily grind of his obsession, he would see in the game itself a way out of the bleak hole he had fallen into. He would take a clear-eyed, calculating look at what he and his fellow players had been doing all those months—at the countless hours they'd given over to the pursuit of purely virtual but implacably scarce commodities—and he would recognize it not just for the underexploited form of productivity it was but for the highly profitable commercial enterprise it might sustain. He would spend the next half decade bringing that business to life. And though some people would hate what he was building, and others would want to take it all away from him, there would come a day when Pierce, eight years older, could look back on an accomplishment that was bigger than he had ever envisioned—and stranger than he would ever comprehend.

New Media Mogul Realizes that Something Has Been Lost, finally

Along the way, I think, something has been lost. It's the same thing my mother lamented as she watched my generation abandon the newspaper - common ground, common spaces - a common set of facts around which we as humans can gather, debate, and connect. And therein lies an opportunity, I sense, to create a new kind of search that is in fact 'not' personalized, but rather socialized - shared and common to all.

Hmm. John Battelle on thought leadership and loss. Muscular Technocracy gets sensitive in middle age.

5000 Days old, Kevin Kelly on the next 5000 days

Worth a viewing.

Squatters rights?

Edelman, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School and an advisor to McAfee, says there are as many as 80,000 domains "typo-squatting" on the United States' top 2,000 websites alone, including MySpace, FaceBook and Craigslist...

...Google is profiting from millions of typo-squatting websites that earn advertising from Google's Adsense advertising program, Harvard University professor Ben Edelman says.

From Wired.
Typosquatting, the definition.

E-books, beware...perhaps

Thanks to Wired for this.

Peter Sunde, one of the founders of Pirate Bay, wrote a mysterious blog post today asking for someone in the U.S. to send him an Amazon Kindle, and hinted that he might be working on a new project involving eBooks.

“Do [sic] anyone wanna help me out? I’m looking to make an interesting service together with some friends in the New Media Market…,” he writes.

Now...Peter Sunde is:

...Peter Sunde (born September 13, 1978), alias brokep, is a Norwegian-Finnish computer expert,known as the co-founder of the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay.

Here's the original Sunde post.


Either a good joke, or the start of something fairly significant in the world of books. For this is the Wikipedia/LA Times take on The Pirate Bay:

According to the Los Angeles Times The Pirate Bay is "one of the world's largest facilitators of illegal downloading", and "the most visible member of a burgeoning international anti-copyright — or pro-piracy — movement."

It was only a matter of time.


The Pirate Bay is here.