Don’t we all recall The Long Tail? This saga of the real chance that we can all have a share? Eventually? If only we dip through the thousand years it takes to earn our two cents? The whole idea was born at Wired’s Headquarters, by their chief wiring…

I feel everything nature has provided to us is free. Only efforts cost. Efforts take time. And time is limited.

We want money etc for our effort, in turn for our time, in turn to buy somebody elses effort and time.

We do all this because to get things your efforts are not complete, your time is not sufficient. You need to buy somebody elses time , in turn effort.

So effort , in turn somebody elses time is not free.

Sorry again for this insight.

“…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

The “free” transaction has two sides: the giver and the receiver. The giver in a free transaction always has a cost (money, time, or some other resource). The receiver should not have a cost — if so then the transaction is not free (like the misleading buy one, get one free offers).

By the way, I’m not trying to discount this discussion. I think it’s important to think about especially with the changes we’re seeing in information delivery.