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The key to riches? Giving things away

Want to be in early on one of the next big idea books? Then you could do worse than go here.

Chris Anderson, author of the Long Tail, has signed up to write a book entitled Free. His intention is to examine the economics of giving things away.

A summary of his thinking is provided in his latest post. But if you want it all in one sentence here it is:

You can make loads of money by giving things away. The key is who you're making money from.

Ringo and power law

Today is the last day to sign the Ringo petition. It has done respectably well in terms of signatures. The theory underpinning it has, I would say, performed spectacularly.

I offered (still offer) Ringo's knighthood as a rare example of something on the Downing Street site that could actually be acted upon.

My argument was that the site would soon fill up with petitions the Government could do nothing about since they opposed existing policy, cost too much money or were simply mad. Even if a petition garnered a million signatures, it might be advancing a proposition that the rest of the population did not agree with, or, if they did, was in direct conflict with the programme of the elected government.

And lo, so it came to pass.

I'd love someone with a spare hour or four to do some work on the petition site. Am I wrong, or do the signatures to petitions distribute themselves exactly according to a power law? It seems to the naked eye that 80 per cent of the signatures are on 20 per cent of the petitions and that there is a very long tail of petitions with hardly any supporters.

If this is right, it would suggest that there is nothing particularly remarkable about the road pricing petition, merely that it is the first of a series of such petitions that will lead the site.

Will paying for books become a thing of the past?

Chris Anderson's book has been pirated and is being given away on the internet for nothing.

And he is pleased.

This is not just because he is the author of The Long Tail and would look like a hypocrite if he said he wasn't pleased (although that's got something to do with it). It is also because he correctly understands that the royalties from a book are not the main way that the author is rewarded.

Very few books would be written if the authors required sales to compensate them for the effort. Most make no money for anyone through the price on the cover.

Authors are, instead, rewarded through the boost to their esteem (self or otherwise), the paid work they might be offered as a result of the book, their increased value to their employer or other employers or simply through experiencing the joy of expression or the pleasure in speaking the truth.

This being so, is it fanciful to imagine that the days of people paying for books are numbered? 

The new buzz words are: radical transparency

After his success with the Long Tail, Wired editor Chris Anderson is always on the look out for new buzz phrases.

I quite like his new one - radical transparency.

The new soap box

Yesterday, I wrote about the way in which cheap production and distribution of political messages would change politics.

One change will be the growth of technology allowing individual MPs to communicate directly with local voters, weakening their reliance on national television and, therefore, the national party machinery and message.

That was yesterday. This morning I was told about this - Clactontv. It is clear that at least one MP is farsighted enough to be planning to start his own local political TV news service. And funded, it seems, by House of Commons expenses.

The Economics of Abundance

Chris Anderson's book The Long Tail has received a great deal of attention - and I think it deserves it.

The best publicised of his conclusions is that the internet is making it possible for the long tail of niche products to find markets, and that there may be as many sales in such specialised products as in the big hits.

I am not sure, however, that this is the most important point in his book.

It is the cheap production and storage of products that is really going to change the world and it is this subject to which Anderson turns in a new presentation entitled the Economics of Abundance. This is best viewed along with this description of its contents.

I think that the Economics of Abundance will fundamentally change politics as well as the entertainment business. Think why the modern political party was created, and why it replaced the chaos of 19th century political groupings. It was a response to scarcity. The expense of producing political propaganda and the difficulty of distributing it by winning space in a small number of media outlets, meant that parties had to be tight, uniform, well disciplined bodies.

But now such tightness will become less necessary and less easy to maintain. The Economics of Abundance suggests to companies they should "try everything" to see if it works. I think political movements will start doing the same.

A new era of much more decentralised, disorganised, experimental politics is just starting.

Not the problem

Trend-spotting journalist James Harkin is rather good at what he does. Yet if the "advocacy revolution" that he identifies in The Guardian - the rise of memberless, professional political lobby groups speaking for no-one but themselves - is a trend, it's a pretty old one. Even the mass membership bodies whose demise he regrets - the trade unions, for instance - were (are) often run by a small elite who have hijacked the authority of the members to make political points.

And Conservativehome is right, Harkin's singling out of the Taxpayers Alliance is odd. The main occupation of memberless advocacy groups has been to press for more, not less, government spending.

A few years back I was involved with a project that recorded calls by pressure groups on the Today programme for policies that might involve extra expenditure. We then costed the items. In a single week the figure reached £14 billion. An alliance of taxpayers, even one with no members, is not the real problem.