In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.
Information wants to be free in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.
From the consumer’s perspective, there is a huge difference between cheap and free. Give a product away, and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you’re in an entirely different business. . . . The truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another.
When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer. That’s the magic of Free psychology: an estimated seventy-five billion videos will be served up by YouTube this year. Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is “close enough to free to round down,” “close enough to free” multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number. A recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube’s bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars.
So how does YouTube bring in revenue? Well, it tries to sell advertisements alongside its videos. The problem is that the videos attracted by psychological Free—pirated material, cat videos, and other forms of user-generated content—are not the sort of thing that advertisers want to be associated with. In order to sell advertising, YouTube has had to buy the rights to professionally produced content, such as television shows and movies. Credit Suisse put the cost of those licenses in 2009 at roughly two hundred and sixty million dollars. For Anderson, YouTube illustrates the principle that Free removes the necessity of aesthetic judgment. (As he puts it, YouTube proves that “crap is in the eye of the beholder.”) But, in order to make money, YouTube has been obliged to pay for programs that aren’t crap.
Broadcast television—the original practitioner of Free—is struggling. But premium cable, with its stiff monthly charges for specialty content, is doing just fine.
There's a lot of appeal in Anderson's argument. I do want stuff for free.
BUT I also want to get paid. And as someone who writes, creates content and generally profits from her ideas, I can't really see how I'll ever pay the rent in the future that Anderson foresees. His model tells us to build an audience and monetize it later -- by selling t-shirts, presumably. But I'm a writer and I want to make my living selling writing, not t-shirts.
Both Gladwell and Anderson are speculating, of course. Yes, lots of people are getting ideas and art for free on the web. Partly because they can. But also partly because they sick of the big corporations making money hand over fist. They feel robbed and see nothing wrong with taking a little back. If you've already paid for Sgt Pepper on vinyl, 8-track, cassette and CD, maybe you don't think you really need to fork out money to get an MP3. If your cable bill is several hundred dollars a month, maybe you figure that it's perfectly reasonable to download a torrent of show you watched. I think many people feel that they have already paid or that the money only goes to making big corporations bigger.
Would they be more willing to pay if they felt the money was going to the actual artists who created it? If it wasn't going to make the rich richer but would keep workers working? I think it would make a huge difference to people.
The obvious question is "why Anderson's book, Free, free?"
What's up with these two messages I found in my Facebook inbox this morning? Is this some new virus?
Both are addressed to "Hi {RAND}" and have multiple recipients listed. Both contain a single URL followed by a 5-digit number as the message, but the URLs -- and the numbers -- are different. One message reads
bulitre.com (55355)
The other reads
junfunrun.com (95337)
Neither of the URLs is set up as a link so if you did want to check out the pages you would have to type in the address. That combined with the {RAND} in the greeting suggests this is a pretty clumsy attack. Somebody didn't test their code I guess.
On the other hand, I did receive two of these things already, one sent at close to 1 am this morning (Monday June 29) from a California based-user. The other was sent at 10:30 this morning from a Toronto-based Facebooker. So it does seem like this thing is spreading.
Facebook users are getting private messages from firends this morning containing the words Hi (Rand) and a link to a Web page.
Not surprisingly, this is a scam. In fact the link takes you to a Web site that attacks your computer.
Roger Thompson, Chief Research Officer with AVG Technologies say's the attack appears to be based on the Luckysploit toolkit, which throws a big whack of different attacks -- IE, Adobe, etc -- at your browser. If you're not fully patched, then it installs a rootkit on your PC.
I've seen a message that includes a link to the bulitre. com (don't go to these domains, they will attack you) and in Twitter messages Facebook users also mention the domain junfunrun . com. (which shares the same IP address).
True Blood is doing some very cool stuff on the web. The Canadian HBO site has quite a bit, but the US HBO site has more, so start your exploration there. Be sure to click on the left hand side of the home page screen just to see it scroll to the right. I haven't found much to do besides click through to character information for Sookie and Bill -- and still, I like it.
The HBO site has plenty to keep you busy for a while. There are episode synopses, character, cast and crew bios (can someone explain to me why the cast and crew information is left off the Canadian site?!), a wiki, fan forums and tons and tons of video.
There's a Facebook group and two official Twittering feeds (@TrueBloodHBO and @BonTempsGossip) plus HBO is also promoting fans who are tweeting in character. That's pretty cool (as is their suggestion that you use #TrueBlood in your tweets about the show). you can also download a fan toolkit that's lots of wallpapers, profile pics, etc.
But the best part of True Blood's web presence is the way they've built out the reality of the show on separate sites and through video. You'll see logos in the bottom right of the HBO homepage that should link you to other sites. I haven't been able to get onto the sites for the American Vampire League, The Fellowship of the Sun or Tru:Blood lately, but BloodCopy is going strong with new blog posts most days. It also has a YouTube channel with a 148 videos!
All this content does a tremendous job of enhancing the series, which is exactly what I'm looking for as a TV fan when I turn to the web. And I have the sense that there may be more content out there that I haven't discovered yet.
True Blood has also done some foreword thinking product integration to promote the second season. You can read more about it at MultiBrain.
Weeds the TV series has a digital component called the University of Andy featuring the character of Andy Botwin (played by Justin Kirk). It's not a big website. There's minimal content: a signup (your email address is such gold to them, isn't it?), a link to the Weeds store and five videos. Judging by the fact that it only takes five classes to earn a degree from the University of Andy, I'm not holding my breath for anymore videos. But the ones that are there do the trick:
It's a cute idea. It doesn't totally build the Weeds brand but it definitely gives fans that extra hit of Andy everyone craves. Now where's the additional content for Kevin Nealon's Doug Wilson?
Back on Showtime's site, the Weeds component isn't fancy but its very effective. There's plenty of content to give the series' fan a little more digital entertainment to keep them going between episodes and seasons. There's a podcast, a blog with posts by guest bloggers, including Televisionary and TheTVAddict.
The Showtime site also has content that avid fans can grab and spread which is free promotion for the series. There are customizable cards you can send to friends and tons and tons of embeddable video and clips.... Sadly the video is geoblocked, so it's not embeddable here in Canada. I can watch it on the Showtime site, but I can't seem to bring it over to this blog.
By comparison to the Showtime site, Showcase's digital offerings for Weeds are just lame. Yes, you can watch streamed episodes, but there are no extras save a few meagre actor bios. I don't get it, shouldn't a license to broadcast the series get you the web extras too?
The geoblocking notwithstanding, the Weeds site on Showtime, combined with University of Andy makes for a good example of what television producers and broadcasters should be offering their fans on the web. It's added content aimed at TV viewers, not particularly expensive and share-able (at least within the US).
"Life didn't take over the globe by combat but by networking."
This pronouncement from Anna Dumitriu who investigates "the relationship of the emerging science of bacterial communication to our own digital communications networks".."using images of live bacteria and of actual internet web traffic to show the similarities in the beauty and networking present in both."
Art from bacteria is a pretty cool idea on its own. But when it reflects back at us the patterns of human activity on the web, it starts to send chills up my spine. Is networking a basic biological function? And if, as Dumitriu suggests, life prevailed through networking and not war, does that make social interaction and connectivity the opposite of war? The antidote to it?
Anna Dumitriu is one of the very cool speakers at subtle technologies, a festival of arts and sciences taking place from June 10th to 14th in Toronto. Four days of symposia, workshops, exhibitions, performances and parties are all built on exploring the theme of networks in art and science.
The topics are diverse, cutting edge and challenging. Ine Poppe will screen part of her film Hippies from Hell, which documents an Amsterdam-based group of hackers, techies, artists and writers who setup the Netherlands first internet provider, xs4all(!). Ryan Stec is Artistic Director of Artengine. He'll be talking about how networked based technologies can help develop artistic communities -- something Canadian screenwriters know a lot about. Katja Mayer from the University of Vienna uses visual networking schematics to better understand how we communicate through media, politics and science. Sebastien Lasserre's symposium promises a "beautiful and epic" trip through the human brain.
I'll be presenting a symposium on my experiments in using the social networks for story telling on Friday morning as part of the conference. It should be very interesting to talk about fiction in this context. I'm so excited to be part of this amazing event, because I'm already thinking about networks in an entirely new way... and so far I've only read the descriptions of the talks. I can't wait to hear them!
For more information about the Subtle Technologies schedule, speakers and events, visit the website. You can also follow the conference on Twitter (@SubtleTech) and Facebook. For the ultimate in cool,the Symposium will be streaming live onto OCAD Island in Secondlife.
This weekend, Toronto's Humber College is offering a workshop in videoblogging with Rocketboom'sAndrew Baron. It looks like a fabulous opportunity to get up close and personal with one of the web's original celebrities and a guy who really knows how to do it.
Here are the deets:
VideoBlogging: The Next Frontier
This special new media Workshop will explore VideoBlogging and offer an inside look by a recognized leader - the creator of Rocketboom Andrew Baron. The three minute daily VideoBlog, based in New York City, is currently one of the most popular VideoBlogs on the internet with more daily subscribers for original syndicated multimedia content than nearly any other site, including podcasts.
The Workshop will explore the differences between creating traditional TV programs and working within the online world, from production to distribution to attracting an audience to sustaining and growing a business. Participants will learn about the new opportunities for content producers, directors and writers, and explore the possibilities for developing and creating online content now and in the future.
Instructor Andrew Baron
Dates June 13th & 14th, 2009
Hours 14
Cost $198.00 per day
Total Tuition $396.00 + GST
To Register Phone Lorraine O'Brien 416.675.6622 ext 4033 or email.
Chris Anderson’s new book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” (Hyperion; $26.99) on why everything should be free:
Malcolm Gladwell refutes his arguments in a new piece in the New Yorker, entitled Priced to Sell: Is free the future?:
Back on Showtime's site, the 
By comparison to the Showtime site, 
The topics are diverse, cutting edge and challenging. Ine Poppe will screen part of her film 
