Thanks for stopping by, it is always good to see a familiar name again.

I did link to the longtail.com announcement in the first sentence. You may have overlooked it as links in the post are not underlined.

http://www.longtail.com/the_lo.....eased.html

Yeah, for small shops you really can’t beat the standard edition.

I have not read Free yet, but I liked some of the ideas from the long tail. It is not a silver bullet, but there are definitely interesting points.

From a usability standpoint, I get what Google is doing, and they do need to shore up where their revenue is coming from because paid search results only work when thousands of people believe it will work for them.

I do love the irony though, but then, I’m not a fan of Anderson’s viewpoints (both the long tail and free, although I’ll reserve judgement on the latter until I actually read it.)

That was my basic, yet probably unclear, point. TechCrunch posted this as they tend to try to get everything first. I was just posting on the irony of it all.

You are correct though. If GMail was suddenly not free, people would go nuts and it would be the lead story on techmeme and probably get a huge article in the NYTimes.

I really think this a non-issue unless Gmail suddenly was not free. Zooming out a little, everything is still free on the net in one form or another, and email is among the most common things.