As Christmas draws near, I thought I’d share some fun online sites you might like to share with your children this holiday season. Of course a quick Google search will yield you thousands of results, but here are a few I’ve enjoyed with my kids.

My 4 year old especially likes these. For him as a child that is growing up with on-demand video and the internet, it seems only natural to incorporate some of what Santa does online.

• Countdown to Christmas features a daily video message from Santa, and a chance to ask St. Nick questions in real time.
• Santa Update features daily “press releases” from the North Pole keeping everyone up to date on the days leading up to Christmas Eve.
• Portable North Pole lets you create a custom video greeting from Santa featuring your child’s name, photo, and location, a sneak-peek at the Naughty/Nice List, and even an update on the toy the wished for.
• Santa Live features live webcams from inside Santa’s office, and outside the workshop.
• NORAD Tracks Santa is the granddaddy of them all and features real-time tracking of Santa, with video updates and a Google Earth option. You can also follow the Twitter Stream, Facebook Page, and Picasa Web Album. If you are an On-Star user, you can even get hourly updates in your vehicle on Christmas Eve.
• Track Santa on your mobile device – Google Maps offers NORAD’s Santa Tracking on supported phones.

Merry Christmas!

(CC licensed image via The Sierra Club)

A couple of days ago, Chris posted Straight Talk on the Price of Free Content, a discussion post on the role of free content in publishing.  The problem with such discussion points is that much of the discussion around Free Content tends to get muddied by traditional business thinking.

If you have grown up prior to, well, now, or have and MBA, you expect a direct relationship between what you do and your income.  There is probably a formula for it, which is every bit as iconic as e=mc2, a formula like: W=$ (work=money). You do some work, you get a tangible result, commensurate payment.

With Free Content, that relationship is broken. If I post some Free Content, doesn’t matter what kind it is, the immediate payment is:

• The opportunity to display my mastery of a subject and a chance to increase my standing in the community I address.
• A chance to draw attention to or generate traffic for my blog/business/consulting/design gig.

Both of these are intangible payments. It is revenue of a sort, but if you plug that into the common understanding of what happens when we work, we do not expect to be repaid in website traffic, or acknowledgment.

It’s very hard to put food on the table with what amount to personal accolades.

The problem is that consulting types, VCs, and people looking to make a living off the web is that they are looking for revenue in the wrong place: free content is about generating indirect revenue.

For example:

• I post to a Blog for a year, and get a publishing deal from it.
• I run a Blog and post a detailed Presentation, and that leads to speaking offers.
• I post a Podcast, and that generates the traffic that drives my advertising revenue.
• I post a Webcomic, and that leads to marketing gig.
• I code some Open Source Software, and sell support for it.

Notice that in all of those examples the initial transaction is free. The author is giving up their time to entertain and educate the reader, listener, or viewer, without asking for direct payment.

There are many people that want to make a claim that this is a brand new world we live in, a new economics…um, no, it isn’t. Sorry. The Free Content business model is nothing new: it is the same model that broadcast television has been using for 50 years.

For a television broadcast, the viewer pays nothing, other than the opportunity cost of watching another show. The cost of the production of that broadcast is shifted, to advertisers, syndication outlets, or purchasers of the inevitable DVD collection.

With Free Content, the consumer of the information pays nothing to the producer; instead income comes from speaking engagements, book sales, or consulting contracts. The payment for the content is decoupled from the consumption of the content, but theoretically the model does not change, just the degree of separation from content to revenue source.

That is why things like Matt Maroon’s Bubble 2.0 post seem off the mark.
In a sense, he is right: you need to ask where the revenue is coming from, and a revenue model that is based on generating revenues directly from Free Content is not sustainable in the long term. Once the money dries up, that’s the end of the show.

I think there is still question that needs to be asked before we automatically write off one of these “Bubble 2.0” companies: how far removed from what we want our audience to do is the revenue stream?

If there is revenue tied indirectly to the content produced, then there is a repeatable, sustainable, revenue model. It may be hard to quantify, and it may be less than if you were getting paid directly, but forecasting revenues from that content is possible. All you need to do is keep producing Free Content.

Where does that leave the venture capitalists, private investors, and fortune seekers that are backing “Bubble 2.0” endeavors?

They need to ask if the Free Content they are producing generates repeatable indirect revenues, and if not, what they can do to align their Free Content with a business model that does.

Preferably, before the seed funding runs out.

The new “economy of free” continues to push content creators of all types to providing free goods and services, and web 2.0 companies are challenged in trying to figue out how to not just live on VC money and actually turn a profit.

Matt Maroon thinks that the free economy will eat itself, and has posted a very insightful post entitled Bubble 2.0 that deserves a read.  Specifically, Matt is talking about software and related web 2.0 companies, but regardless of what you are selling (or giving away for free) I think Matt’s alternative view deserves consideration as well.

I think that at the end of the day, much of our new free culture is going to turn out to be just plain unsustainable. I’m predicting that we’re going to see a large number of high-flying startups crash, just like we did before. They aren’t currently flying as high or as conspicuously as last time, so the crashes will be much more graceful, but crash they will. This time they won’t depress the public markets, at least not directly, just hedge funds and private equity.

I have my own opinion, and think free definitely has a place in the business model, but I want to know what you think.  Can companies turn a profit on “free?”

So where does this leave publishers? The book publishing companies and music companies seem to have been left out of this equation. You could argue that they’ve left themselves out of the equation by desperately attempting to pretend that the business model of content creation hasn’t changed while vainly suing fans for the crime of being early adopters of a new economy.

Actually, there is a role for clued-up skills-rich publishers. It’s just a slightly different role than they’re used to. The clues can be found when you examine the new business model summarised above and look for the holes.

(Thanks to Publishing Talk)

We have experimented on both fronts. For example, our electronic Wrox Blox are DRM-free, and we give away some portion of almost every book we publish. We have made entire books available online for free, and Robert Scoble’s and Shel Israel’s Naked Conversations was written online.

Like their distributor, O’Reilly, did back in March 2006, publisher No Starch Press is experimenting with free e-books. Leander Kahney’s Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod have been seeded via BitTorrent and are now sitting atop the Pirate Bay’s Top e-book list.

We’ll be watching to see if making the electronic versions of these books available for free has any effect whatsoever on book sales. And if there is some noticeable effect whether it’s a positive one.

I’ll be interested to see if there is a sales boost for these titles. The O’Reilly experiment did not show a boost in print copies when the free e-book was announced. In fact, there was little effect on sales at all, although they started the experiment at the end of the book’s life as sales were already declining. However, there was a slight increase in book sales which dropped immediately after the announcement of the free e-book.

I’ve been in publishing for just over 20 years and my training has not been to give books away. But I think there’s something to this and logic tells me that if we increase the visibility of our titles, we’ll sell more books.

I’m not sure the availability of the e-book on BitTorrent is increased visibility. In fact, I would be very surprised if the book was not already available via a torrent before its “official” release into the wild. It is my experience that most books eventually end up on filesharing sites at some point.

What do you think? Have you ever purchased a book after getting the entire thing for free online?

The first of these new products is ASP3Wiki, and is best summarized by this post on Jim Mintel’s blog.

Wrox’s ASP3Wiki is the complete contents of one of the best-selling web programming books ever, Beginning Active Server Pages 3.0, free, online, in wiki format. Why? Well, we know from our traffic on p2p.wrox.com that ASP 3.0 is still a widely used web platform, even today 8 years after it debuted. Think about that: how many web programming tools are still in as widespread use as ASP 3 is 8 years after they launch? So, even though the sales of the paper book finally slowed to a tricked about 12 months ago, we know there’s still demand out there for this information and we’ve decided (along with the blessings of the lead authors thank you Dave Sussman, Jon Duckett, and Chris Ullman!) to make this freely available on this wiki.

This is just one of several e-content experiments we are working on in our Wrox brand.  If feedback is positive on ASP3Wiki, we plan to roll out additional wikis on current topics, perhaps consider bundles with printed books and wiki access and so forth.

If you feel this format works for you, let us know. We want to build product you want and want to hear from you.

Jeff Gomez

Anderson discusses several ways he and his publisher are considering making aspects of his upcoming book free, but stops short of simply releasing a free e-book:

“free book is the marketing for the non-book thing.” In his case, what he’s really selling is himself. He also acknowledged that, for his publisher, this is a difficult and different proposition. But Anderson believes that “you give away what you can give away, and you charge what you can charge for,” and that all of the iterations of the eBook or the printed book with ads — that any way you offer the “free” version — will be inferior to the real book.

Many of the “free things” Chris discusses as part of his book project are things we have discussed at my company such as advertising in books, and free sample chapters online – so there’s nothing really revolutionary about what they are considering. However if they execute on ideas like in-book advertising, they would be the first to actually do so to my knowledge.

You should head over to Jeff’s blog to read his coverage, but one item that was especially interesting was their social media focused approach to marketing his first book, The Long Tail:

Give away books to “influentials.” (This worked incredibly well for The Long Tail, where Anderson convinced his publisher to print 1,000 ARCs — many more than publishers usually print — and they ended up getting about 800 copies into the hands of interested bloggers. From this, more than 600 online reviews appeared, which then linked to Amazon. Anderson said that his Amazon sales outweighed his bookstore sales, leading him and his publishes to believe that all of that online-linking led to more Internet/Amazon sales.)

1000 review copies is generally unheard of, but look at the return on their investment – 600 highly influential reviews driving sales to Amazon.com where the book has had a permanent home on their Computers and Internet Best Seller List since its release.

Chris Anderson is also blogging about “Free” at his Long Tail blog.