Thoughts&Tools » Part 000: "Information wants to be free" - or on how to make a living offline

There is a constant drive to things online will drive away at zero cost, and that is monetary cost. For the user. First. And for the producer - a little bit later. I mean, time and energy,  attention, and passion isn't something you buy in a shop, but for the financial capital there is an asymptotic drive towards zeroizing. Learning how to leverage in this world with an increasing oppurtunity to make money though information-shuffeling in other media, indirectly, is the key. Offline.

Some posts lately have reminded me of this phenomenon, what to price, and what not, e. g. TechCrunch and their Web App 101 school. And their note on CD Sales down 20 percent. DJ's make their bulk money from appearances, not their musical production. Authors on speaking gigs and fuelling up events, and servicing offline to clients with high price tags, not book sales. At the same time, the copyright industry constantly battles towards those who want to spread culture, now recently with the risk of killing alot of radio stations on the net with an incredible progressive over time pricing with only Big Media being able to take the price tag with it in the end and killing alot of net radio stations! Will they never give up?

Anyways, if you still want to make money from your office, it is getting increasingly harder to stay ahead, so my vote maybe if you want to make a living by living your making if you don't want that much of public appearances is to get into some sort of production of physical stuff or trading, and then sustainable production and trade all categories (I will post about that in more detail over at my main blog www.sustainopreneurship.biz).

Anyways, still, there is the possibility to make money from premium services from the tools I cover here in this blog. When a service is good, and you want more from it, then you are prepared to pay. But - if you want people to discover it - some supportive engines are great to get your surfer there. And maybe one of the best tricks here is to have a free eBook as a semi-promotional tool, but not a book that is filled with your service web address - then it is not going to be long-lived - rather the massively good ideas that motivated the service in the first place. Ideas that can apply elswhere and make the world a better place in other aspects, to create a positive change.

This brings me to the point on wondering: Why do 37signals still not give away their book Getting Real for free - in the PDF format? In the beginning, they only gave away some sample chapters. OK, now the book is available in web pages, one chapter per web page. But, no, the PDF is still $19, and 10-reader company licenses $49??? Volume rebate for something that is just bits in the end, and fully replicable? 20 000 in spread? Bad for such a great package of ideas to rest behind pricey friction and unneccesary firewalls like that - after all, a printout with plenty of space of sidenotes is fuelling creativity! (Sorry, all the trees, I have to print sometimes - when I am writing myself, mostly.) Otherwise, reading on screen is all ok, just for info. But this book, Getting Real, signals something else, and is worth to have offline in print, since it connects directly to what you are doing, and thus inspires to note-taking. And sometimes reading out in the sun is not that bad, right? Especially when spring arrives, as it has here in eastern Sweden!

So, I thought they should do like Seth Godin and his Ideavirus. He posted recently this great story, about the launch of the book "Unleashing the Ideavirus". In fact, it was through an article in the print edition of Fast Company, yes, that I bought offline :), that led me to the idea-world of Seth, and the free eBook "Unleashing the Ideavirus". Yes, I was in the first loop of downloaders of this book soon to come seven years ago, that is dealing primarily with an adaption of the theory of memes into the marketing and business sub-worlds. His spread-to-hard-drive to date is not 20 000. Not 200 000. No, it is probably somewhere around 2 000 000+. Yes, a smashing 2 million!

In a post over at TechCrunch, the co-founder of 37signals, Jason Fried, is quoted and admits that they are keen on not to give away too much for free. That's ok with me - someone has to pay your rent and food. But this can be a drawback if it is drawn to hard as a principle, and that is to give away too little! With their latest release, for the nightmare and pain of keeping track of contacts and actions, a relief for all kinds of RM, relationship management, called HighRise, they even had to take a backfire from the first adopters, so they had to give more for free! Too greedy, and you risk loose it all. In fact, the uploading features of documents for free over at Zoho Planner has made my shift away from Backpack, since they charge for attaches to be made to pages.

Sorry, Guys!

So, let's end with a little wisdom on this Thought Note.

"There is enough in the world for a man's need, but not enough for man's greed" as Gandhi said.

--

Some pennies of thought there, given away for *free*, from me.

And you are not allowed to make money on it by selling a copy ;). But you are free to use the text to make your life better, and ultimately the world, right? And you can even make the text better by remixing any way you want! Yeah. Just tell me where you do it, it is fun to see where ideas spread :). If you blog, ping me back with a track-back!

So for the spreading rights, my favourite Creative Commons "some rights reserved" - in between public domain and copyright licenses - are two.

The CC license statement ending this post applies to ALL my online writings, unless else stated. And I will be better stating it, too in the future :).

What is your idea? Where do you want to see it spread? And how?

This was an intro post with sequels to come in a new series: Look out for next piece of T&T: Thoughts&Tools. I hope it to be the dynamite for those who wants to blow away people's minds and create massive change :). Yeah. TnT :).

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