Ever since I first read Kevin Kelly's "New Rules for the New Economy" back in 1998, his "follow the free" chapter has been stuck in my head. The other chapters are in there somewhere too still, since the book was fascinating at the time, is still relevant today, and many of the predictions and advices are playing out. Take email for example. Not too long ago many of us had no choice but to pay for simple email service, and today you can have as many email accounts as you like for nothing (let's not get in to the cost of time of spam and those issues). It's moved towards freedom in other ways as well, when you look at the move from 2MB in Hotmail to 2000MB in Gmail a couple of years ago. People are willing to pay now for premium services, but the basic service is good and free. There are many examples like that and it's ramping up exponentially. Not to mention the fact that Kelly follows his own advice and makes the entire book text available on the web.

This is always in the back of my head when I'm thinking of new things for Innucopia. People are used to having to pay for stuff, and many don't have the time or knowledge they need to know better. Sometimes they're getting taken for thousands of dollars for things like making a simple website. I agree that you shouldn't balk at paying for quality, but I don't like to see people hoodwinked. So, one of the main goals of Innucopia is to give people the knowledge they need to make more informed decisions about inexpensive and free web tools and services, for free. Knowledge is power!