Blog Tips- Much is being said about the new book by Chris Anderson (The Long Tail
), FREE, including that he may have plagiarized significant portions and comments coming in from Mark Cuban and Seth Godin. So, Chris is getting significant attention already and we look forward to reading the full work. But, in the meantime, continue to examine what the future will hold for content. Music, movies, blogs, newspapers; must they all be free? Or, is this transition period the harbinger for changes to improve the distribution of knowledge, entertainment and all content. Will the internet in the end ruin everything and all economic models, or bring renewed opportunity? We've seen the demise of record companies, in great part due to the executives ignoring the digital age and their clinging on to old models. The newspaper, magazine and home entertainment (dvd) companies were nearly as slow to react as their record company friends, only recently coming to terms with the reality of digital and internet opportunities. We saw blogs take hold and impact print, we now see Twitter and it's free resource impacting blogs.
As Wired.com points out: "Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411."
What will all this mean for your blog? Will free make it harder to monetize a blog? It should mean more blog opportunities, more content to offer your readers and more chances for you to bring on changes to help your followers. The issue really is, how to deal with a world full of free. Don't fight free, use FREE, and make it a model for success.
See the review of FREE in The New Yorker.
