I have been intrigued by the back and forth between Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell, and Mark Cuban on the topic of “Free” as a strategy and business model….Here is where I come down on all of this. First and foremost, Free is a disruptive force. This does not mean that if you deploy a free business model you will be successful.

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At a hearing on Capitol Hill in May, James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told Congress about negotiations he’d just had with the online retailer Amazon (AMZN). The idea was to license his newspaper’s content to the Kindle, Amazon’s new electronic reader. “They want seventy per cent of the subscription revenue,” Moroney testified.

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As he kicked off the Wired Business Conference on Monday, Wired magazine’s editor in chief, Chris Anderson, started talking about Jell-O.

Anderson was explaining the thesis of his forthcoming book, “Free,” about the realities of making a profit and building a business in an environment rife with digital goods that can be replicated at almost no cost.

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Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired, believes in logic the way Tina Brown believes in buzz. He rarely approves a story idea unless the writer backs up the thesis with data.

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Over the past few weeks there has been a flurry of reappraisals of the Long Tail, most of which center around the question of whether it creates bigger blockbusters or smaller ones (more concentrated markets or less concentrated ones).

My predictions have always been that massive increase in variety plus massive improvements in “filters” (tools to make it easier to find new stuff that’s right for you) would tend to reduce the blockbuster effect and redistribute attention over a wider range. And, indeed, that’s what the data I cited in my book showed, where online markets of books, DVDs and music saw between 20 and 40 percent of the demand shift to products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores.

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“All models are wrong, but some are useful.” So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don’t have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don’t have to settle for models at all.

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A decade and a half into the great online experiment, the last debates over free-versus-pay online are ending. In 2007 the New York Times went free; this year, so will much of The Wall Street Journal. Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. … 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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Companies are increasingly being asked to calculate their carbon footprint, and if they’re public, publish it. Good idea? Perhaps. But it’s harder than you might think, and the results can sometimes be counterintuitive. Take my own industry, magazine publishing. Surely dead-tree media is bad for the climate, and Web media is good, right? Well, not necessarily.

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