Just listened to a
National Public Radio interview with Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of
Wired magazine. It sounds fascinating.
Description from Publisher's Weekly:"Starred Review. In the digital marketplace, the most effective price is no price at all, argues Anderson (The Long Tail). He illustrates how savvy businesses are raking it in with indirect routes from product to revenue with such models as cross-subsidies (giving away a DVR to sell cable service) and freemiums (offering Flickr for free while selling the superior FlickrPro to serious users). New media models have allowed successes like Obama's campaign billboards on Xbox Live, Webkinz dolls and Radiohead's name-your-own-price experiment with its latest album. A generational and global shift is at play—those below 30 won't pay for information, knowing it will be available somewhere for free, and in China, piracy accounts for about 95% of music consumption—to the delight of artists and labels, who profit off free publicity through concerts and merchandising. Anderson provides a thorough overview of the history of pricing and commerce, the mental transaction costs that differentiate zero and any other price into two entirely different markets, the psychology of digital piracy and the open-source war between Microsoft and Linux. As in Anderson's previous book, the thought-provoking material is matched by a delivery that is nothing short of scintillating."
However, after looking for other reviews, I ran across a blog post from the Virginia Quarterly Review:
"Chris Anderson’s Free Contains Apparent Plagiarism" by Waldo Jaquith on June 23rd, 2009. Jaquith gives many examples of material that is lifted straight from Wikipedia with no citations. He plans to source this material prior to publication; his excuses seem quite lame considering he is a professional journalist.
Could be a teachable moment for students.
Just finished reading City of Falling Angels. It was a compelling read and felt like a 400 page Vanity Fair article with all the gossip and tales of the rich and famous. I was introduced to the Fenice Opera house which burned in 1996 just days before Berendt arrived in Venice. He stayed on for about 9 years to investigate the fire while getting to know the Venetians and ex-pats on an intimate basis. I was particularly intrigued about the life and works of Ezra Pound who lived in Rapallo and Venice. I even borrowed the PBS video of Pound's biography to enhance my understanding of his poetry.
