There’s quite a wonderful authorial kerfuffle happening between Chris Anderson, whose recent book “Free” has been the target both of plagiarism charges (from Wikipedia, of all places, oh the wonderful irony, one might think Chris actually planted the whole damn thing…) and Malcolm Gladwell, who never met a clever anecdote he couldn’t convert into a well turned (and dammingly entertaining) book of his own.
I won’t go into the whole thing, because, honestly, I just don’t have the, er, free time.
However, I do find it noteworthy that Chris’s much-linked to riposte to Malcolm’s initial evisceration comes on Wired.com, where, shock of all shocks, advertising is prominently featured. Free, of course, doesn’t come without a business model.
This is quite amusing … (!)
“Free, of course, doesn’t come without a business model.”
Uh, isn’t the whole point of Anderson’s book how to make a business model out of free?
Here he is back in September last year laying out his three models of free, where #2 is “the media business model, ranging from free-to-air broadcast radio and television to all ad-supported content online today”
http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2008/09/the-three-kinds.html