Microblogging random examples of free

I'm back from the family vacation (the beach at Stinson was perfect aside from the 12ft Great White) and am now entering the last two months of crunch book writing. We'll be launching a blog redesign tomorrow, and the focus will shift to mostly FREE material (although the name of the blog will remain the same--there's too much Googlejuice there to give it up).

To replace the sidebar in current blog, I'll be microblogging random interesting examples of free as I come across them. Here's today's, from Marginal Revolution:

A Danish chain of gyms is now offering membership free of charge, with the only caveat that you have to show up, in order for the membership to be free. If you fail to show up once per week you will be billed the normal monthly membership fee for that month. This should solve the problem with incentives that gym-membership normally carries - there is suddenly a very large (membership is around 85$ per month) incentive to show up each week.

Comments

[Justin Marx]

So, you are going to be abandoning writing about the long tail here just because you've got some google juice with this domain? Why would you just write about gimmicks? Did I really just learn anything via your suicidal gym story? Sounds pretty dumb to me...anyone who regularly goes to a gym anyway will quickly sign-up...making it overcrowded. And, then customers who are dissatisfied about the crowds will stop going and then get pissed off about being charged for it. If they were issuing stock...I'd short it.

[Chris Anderson]

@Justin: Huh? Let me make this easier for you. This is my blog. I'm now working on my second book, FREE. I blog about what I'm working on. But I'm not going to change the domain name because it's a big part of my reputational identity (both in Google's eyes and others). I'll still blog about the Long Tail when I've got something new to say, but it's bound to be a smaller fraction of what I do here.

In the new design I'll try to find a way for the microblogging content to have its own channel, so you can choose to subscribe or not (much like the current sidebar).

What part of this are you having trouble with?

[Craig]

Sounds like a cool new angle you are going with. Loved The Long Tail book and looking forward to the blog redesign and the new book FREE coming out. I'm going to miss more more articles about the long tail, although the new material seems interesting and already has me hooked. Good luck with everything and look forward to all the new things ahead.

Craig
www.budgetpulse.com

[Grant Sanders]

Chris:

12 seconds after I stopped reading The Long Tail two weeks ago (my new 3-hour commute has given me an opportunity to listen to all the books that have been piling up on my list), my brain screamed at me:

"Somebody should push this idea to the next level and talk about all of the things that are free today that we paid for ten years ago. Somebody should talk about how some things are free, but someone always ends up paying for it. Somebody should write about what will be free in the future (phone service, cable, power) and why."

And I set out to white-board an outline. And a title, Free World.

Now I see you're working on the same thing. So I'll stop now. :-) (Thank goodness.) Looking forward to your new book and I'll read about it on your blog along the way.

G.

[Chris Anderson]

Thanks Grant. "Free World" is actually the title of the fifth chapter of the new book. No doubt you saw my Wired cover story on this earlier this year, too. I'm glad Long Tail -> Free seems as obvious a progression to you as it did to me ;-)