Chris Anderson's free lunch

Chris Anderson (editor in chief of Wired) is best known for his 2006 book The Long Tail and ongoing blog of the same name. Today's post:

And so it begins. Just as I started The Long Tail with a feature in my own magazine in 2004, today FREE begins in magazine form: a 6,000 word preview of the book in the current issue of Wired.
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The feedback I get on this piece and on the exploration of other FREE themes on this blog over the next year will be invaluable in making a better book, just as it was with The Long Tail. This is the start of my explorations of the world of FREE, not the end.

The article is well worth reading -- though I'm not completely persuaded.

If you want more on the topic, I recommend a book from 1999: Free, Perfect, and Now - Connecting to the Three Insatiable Customer Demands: A CEO's True Story (by Robert Rodin).

Back to the Wired article: it includes a mention of Josh Kopelman's penny gap. The "Redeye VC" takes the opportunity to link to his great post on shrinking a market which we've mentioned before.

Fred Wilson of AVC issues a correction:

Chris credits me with the word freemium in the post and he's wrong about that. I suggested we come up with a catchy name but Jarid Lukin delivered the name and try as I might, he never seems to get credit for it.

and links to a great post of his from 2005: In Defense of Free.