A Request and Some Interesting Links

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Hi CopyNighters,
Could I ask a favor of someone? I'm out of town the fourth Tuesday of this month. Is there someone on the mailing list who would be willing to pinch hit for me and organize this month's CopyNight?
I would work with that person to pick a place, but I would ask that they pick a topic and at the meeting play greeter, host, and umpire.
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Secondly, some links of note. At February's CopyNight we discussed Chris Anderson's piece on "Free" though none of us had read it yet.
Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free
Excerpt:
"Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.
"The rise of "freeconomics" is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore's law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero."
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I came across this piece by Kevin Kelly and I'm still processing it. It touches on other subjects we discussed last month, e.g. gift economies and other alternative business models.
1,000 True Fans
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php
Excerpt:
"The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.
"But the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators. Individual artists, producers, inventors and makers are overlooked in the equation. The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices. Unless artists become a large aggregator of other artist's works, the long tail offers no path out of the quiet doldrums of minuscule sales.
"Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail?
"One solution is to find 1,000 True Fans."
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Let me know if you're willing to host this month's CopyNight.
Joseph Price
dc@copynight.org