Adam,

Just starting reading your blog. (I found out about it by being a customer of Detailed Image. Love the new site by the way.)

I liked Anderson’s “Free” book a lot specifically because it didn’t put up a complete framework. Anecdotes, trends, a few principles and some interesting way that trends and principles interact (EG, long term prices approach marginal production costs + Moore’s law).

People have done stuff for publicity before, that’s not new. Celebrities, politicians, academics, these guys never got paid to be on talk shows or that kind of thing. But I agree. Ten years ago some internet personality would have had a harder time getting famous people to work for free. Would he have been able to deliver the readers though?

The really interesting thing is that for a lot of these people, the stuff they get paid for is the minority of what they do. I think that Godin makes his money off speaking once or twice a week. He’s also founder or board member of all sorts of ventures. I imagine he spends the majority of his time blogging, being a net citizen, writing books, organizing & distributing free content (like this) and other stiff that doesn’t directly pay.

It’s like freemium but for people.

Good point. That totally works for these 2.0 people you describe. I wonder what the result would be if we went back to 1999 and did the same thing. We had a site with a large following and tried to entice 70 of the best thinkers on the web to write a short essay. I think it’d be near impossible. I think it would be hard to even find a way to contact a lot of these people, yet alone get them to agree to doing it…for free. That’s what really fascinates me. Just how much has changed in the last 10 years.

Surely Godin and the other authors benefit by doing this. They increase their value in my eyes by giving me something I enjoy for free, therefore increasing the likelihood that I’ll read their blog and eventually buy their books or products.

It’s just a totally different approach. Work for free now to get more later. I’m trying to figure out what exactly has changed. People just seem more willing to be nice. Is it because our entire lives are digital and our online rep can be tarnished with a few bad moves? That kind of makes sense, but it’s too much of a fear-driven thing. I think the technology is more of an enabler than the cause.

Go back 50 years. The 70 best authors wouldn’t write a series of short stories in the New Yorker for free. I’m fairly certain that they’d demand payment for their work. Even though in much the same way they’d benefit by getting the exposure and subsequent book sales.

Why?

Seth Godin can get a book in to the hands of a lot of people (on the blog, he says he’s aiming for 5 million but that sounds ambitious). If you can deliver readers, you can get the writers. In this case, the ask was not really that big, a concise one page contribution.

*I mean people like Christopher Hitchens, Salman Rushdie, Noam Chomsky, Peter Singer, etc. ). Maybe there isn’t really a 2.0. Maybe it’s more like 1.1.
*”Creative capitalism” was an experiment in this kind of thing using the 1.0 intellectuals. http://www.amazon.com/Creative-Capitalism-Conversation-Buffett-Economic/dp/141659941X