Is Chris Anderson Right or Wrong? Or Free or Not Free, that is the question

There's a lot of debate about Chris Anderson's new book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price.”

Malcolm Gladwell reviewed the book negatively in the New Yorker, in a review entitled, "Priced to Sell: Is free the future?"

Seth Godin responded by writing, "Malcolm is wrong."

Then Bruce Nussbaum at BusinessWeek looked at the debate in "Seth Godin Vs. Malcolm Gladwell on Chris Anderson's Book, Free," and declared the winner to be...

Gladwell.

Then more people weighed in on the debate. You can check out the debate here.

What do I think?

I think there's a lot to be said on both sides of the debate.

But here's my question: If Anderson believes in free so much, how come: he's charging $26.99 via Amazon -- full price, too! How come his magazine, Wired, charges a subscription fee?

Suddenly free isn't so appealing, I guess.

The Deal Knocks the Journal on Top Business Gurus

In a recent article, The Deal takes the Wall St. Journal to task for ranking top business gurus. Entitled, "The wisdom racket (updated): The Wall St. Journal Discovers the Ingredients for Gurudum: Thin, Trendy, and Obvious and M&A Reporters Offer Dueling Punditry," The Deal said it noted "three signs of the apocalypse in a single story" because the Journal:

1. Presented the entire article on the front page of the Journal's Marketplace section.
2. The methodology behind the ranking, which basically consisted of tallying up the "Google hits, media mentions and academic citations" scored by a list of influential business thinkers.
3. And then the list includes NY Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, in spots No. 2 and No. 4, respectively. Meanwhile Michael Porter and Tom Peters, who topped a similar list in 2003, fell to Nos. 14 and 18, respectively.

Ok, I don't agree these are signs of the apocalypse, but I do have to agree that ranking based on Google hits isn't necessarily the most scientific method to ranking gurus by impact.

The article is available here.