At the end of January, Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired and formerly publisher/editor of Whole Earth Review, posted what I think was the best essay of 2008 of relevance to us in the media -- Better Than Free -- in his blog called The Technium. The post has also attracted a number of good comments in the months since. I linked to it at the time and compared it to Chris Anderson's upcoming writing on the same topic. The essay is now available as a "manifesto" in pdf form at ChangeThis.
On this topic, also see his People Want To Pay and Where Attention Flows, Money Follows, from which comes:
"... Free is always a fine way to win a flow of attention. As Chris Anderson's clever parsing of the four types of free shows, whenever a free product or service is given, the free is exchanged for attention. Without the flow of attention back to the producer, the free is meaningless. A producer might as well dump the free things in the woods if attention from customers did not count...."
--Dennis
