I’m here at The Wired Store listening to Chris Anderson, who is introducing us, at this exclusive free breakfast (which I dragged my body to) listen to his ideas and the next book he’s writing.

I could almost hear Paul Krugman‘s ideas of “spending our way out of deflation” superimposed over Chris Anderson’s rant about the New Free, and what “Free” means as times change.

The idea that technologists make technology cheap but “WE” figure out how to use it.

Chris maintains that Computing has become so commonplace that it’s no longer “metered”, as computing once was.

Same thing with Storage.

Chris Anderson thinks society might be focusing on the wrong metrics in determing future trends. Google figured it out (Yahoo was forced to adapt). Gmail is an example.

Bandwidth is another thing that is becoming “Free”. The history of free bandwidth started with Radio in the 1920′s and TV in the 1950′s to YouTube in 2005. It’s also about “Everybody Loves Raymond“.

Problem is that no one loves Raymond.

We will figure out what the future of Television by “whasting it”. The future of technology is to make it so commonplace that it’s free, and then Change happens.

The 4 kinds of Free

20th Free (you’ll pay for it eventually)

21st Free (free to you but some one else pays for it).

Freemimum model – give away 95% free while 5% pay for premium services. People who pay care about the product.

Gift Economy Free – people are motivated by “psychic” rewards, psychological drivers that work better than Money as a driver.

Economy – what is the defination?

Bertrand (France 1900′s) – competiton will lower prices to close to 0. 100 years later, The Internet, makes the marginal costs are “0″ and everything digital will become Free.

And, everything that can be Digital will be Digital and become Free.

Games, shift from selling Games to selling Play (software as a service). In a game there are 2 ways, walk or “buy” to teleport.

What that tells me, what Chris Anderson is saying, is that TIME is the new cURRANCY in the new media model.

Competing with FREE

- match Free with Free (microsoft) and Free is a good way to market (some will pay, eventually- Free creates Celibrity which can be monitized).

- Open Source (current version)- people are buying different services (software is free, but everything around it, not, and people value those services and will want to Paid). Example is Microsoft BizSpark.

-IPhone (free and paid versions) and Freenimum.

Interesting, so the Freenimum model is the answer?

Free is a way to sell Your Brand.

Actually, I’m thinking that Chris Andersen’s ideas don’t work for every industry or circumstance – but that, maybe, those industries need to Re-Invent themselves and how they provide value.   Certainly the Automotive Industry needs to be Re-Invented, but so does the Job Search and Online Recruitment Industry need be Re-Invented.

I spoke with Chris briefly and got a signed copy of his book – but since I’ve read it already, just the last chapter on the Long Tail of Marketing is new – I’ll read that …and then, maybe I’ll read the rest of the book, if I have time.

Problem is, many people are beginning to de-bunk the idea of the Long Tail – and have, for the last two years – so I don’t know if the Long Tail, and the new book Chris is writing has all the answers – but I think it’s good to know about his ideas because they are influential.

In fact, what I’d like to see more of, is Chris Andersen asking people how they might apply his ideas to their industry – I don’t see any of that – and personally – I think a lot of his ideas need to be distilled to work in any particular situation (which I said to him).

Sebastian and I are slowly building our Blogspeedway.com blog network from a couple of different angles, one of them being the identification of Influentials based on Social Media (I’m using Radian6 to identify influentials) and then, go out and contact them, and ask them to  check out Blogspeedway.com, and apply to join, if they’re interested.

So far, in the last month or so, we’ve added about 20 bloggers, a few need to still be added to the online list, and we’re more of a loose community at this point with influence building coming first, and making money off of it, later.

But I had not actually published the list of Gardening Influential Blogs that I found, based on a set of keywords I harvested out of Google Keyword Planning Tool – here’s the list of blogs, first with two lists – one based on expensive keywords and another based on much less expensive keywords, both have decent traffic:

< $1.00 + higher traffic = long tail blogs
http://earthfirst.com/
http://richardxthripp.thripp.com/
http://www.electricboogaloo.net/wordpress/
http://fairegarden.wordpress.com/
http://www.gardenrant.com/
http://urban-oasis.blogspot.com/
http://perennialgardener.wordpress.com/
http://oodlesandoodles.typepad.com/
http://backyardneighbor.typepad.com/
http://scribbit.blogspot.com/
http://nikkipolani.wordpress.com/
http://razorfamilyfarms.com/
http://reddirtramblings.com/
http://bayouwoman.wordpress.com/
http://maydreamsgardens.blogspot.com/
http://straightfromthefarm.wordpress.com/
http://www.flowergardengirl.com/
http://www.growbetterveggies.com/
http://www.gardeninggonewild.com/
http://www.sansomfamily.com/
http://bungalowinsanity.com/
http://ledgeandgardens.typepad.com/
http://carletongarden.blogspot.com/
http://patientgardener.wordpress.com/
http://kaseyskorner.typepad.com/
http://digitalflowerpictures.blogspot.com/

And here’s a set of Gardening Influencer Blogs that have higher cost and higher traffic

High Cost (a couple of dollars) + High Traffic
http://fairegarden.wordpress.com/
http://www.gardeninggonewild.com/
http://blog.douggreensgarden.com/
http://scribbit.blogspot.com/
http://reddirtramblings.com/
http://ivoryspring.wordpress.com/
http://www.gardenrant.com/my_weblog/
http://razorfamilyfarms.com/
http://urban-oasis.blogspot.com/
http://www.octamom.com/
http://www.netkushi.com/blogs/blogs/4scd/
http://maydreamsgardens.blogspot.com/
http://plantwhateverbringsyoujoy.com/
http://webecoist.com/
http://wherethebeesare.blogspot.com/
http://nomorehornets.blogspot.com/
http://gardeningtipsnideas.com/
http://thebrendablog.typepad.com/thebrendablog/
http://doneganlandscaping.com/
http://www.nestmaker.com/
http://www.veggiegardeningtips.com/
http://brambleberriesintherain.com/
http://godmessedmeup.blogspot.com/
http://rozcawley.typepad.com/autumn_cottage_diarist/
http://homemades.blogspot.com/
http://www.juliezickefoose.com/blog/index.php

There’s a few blogs in each list that overlap, but most don’t – and taking them both together – I used my own methodology to cull this list – most of the bloggers are unknown beyond the small sphare of their Gardening followers, but I believe, this is precisely the place to start for Blogspeedway.com.

We also have about several more segments that I’ll do research on, but I thought I’d publish the full list of Gardening Influentials here – take a look at them for yourself and see how much you agree.

By the way, while many of these blogs do look similar, but I don’t think they’re all the same people; in fact, to prove they’re all different people I ran LinkSurvey 1.6 on the first list to see if there was any common links – which would indicate, if nothing else, these bloggers knew of each other and may have decided to trade links or linked to a common source.  Nada.

Good!  I’ll soon be writing all the blogs below and inviting them to checkout Blogspeedway.com

A pretty good post at Read/WriteWeb on You can make money on the long tail but not in the long tail:

"..It is often forgotten that money is to be made by leveraging the collective long tail, however, making money while being part of the long tail is very difficult. Specifically, in the blogosphere, the vast majority of blogs have very few readers. It is not realistic to expect these blogs to make money. As the enthusiasm and the incentive in the long tail begin to wear off, what would be the impact on the businesses that depend on them? Likely, the impact is going to be large."