The Real Cost Of Free from paidContent.org by MediaGuardian

By Cory Doctorow: Last week, my fellow Guardian columnist Helienne Lindvall published a piece headlined The cost of free, in which she called it “ironic” that “advocates of free online content” (including me) “charge hefty fees to speak at events”. Lindvall says she spoke to someone who approached an agency I once worked with to hire me for a lecture and was quoted $10,000-$20,000 (£6,300-£12,700) to speak at a college and $25,000 to speak at a conference. Lindvall goes on to talk about the fees commanded by other speakers, including Wired editor Chris Anderson, author of a book called “Free” (which I reviewed here in July 2009), Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde and marketing expert Seth Godin. In Lindvall’s view, all of us are part of a united ideology that exhorts artists to give their work away for free, but we don’t practice what we preach because we charge so much for our [...] I have no idea what Seth Godin is doing on your hitlist: Seth’s a marketing consultant. The last three times I’ve heard him speak, he’s been talking about how to improve corporate communications and brand identity – that sort of thing. Sure, he apparently charges a very large sum of money for this advice, but that’s the topsy-turvy world of marketing for you. If your point is that creative people deserve to get paid, then presumably you’re all for Seth charging whatever the market will bear.

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What Seth Godin Did on His Summer Vacation from Inc.com by John Warrillow

For many Inc. readers, Seth Godin needs no introduction. The marketing guru has written twelve bestsellers and his latest book, Linchpin, hit the Amazon top 10 list on the first day it was published and later became a New York Times bestseller. As an entrepreneur, he has founded dozens of companies, some of which flopped. But one, Yoyodyne popped and was ultimately acquired by Yahoo! in 1998. Yoyodyne pioneered the use of ethical direct mail online, something Godin calls “permission marketing” – also the name of his classic book, which Fortune ranked as the year’s best business book in 1999. His latest company, Squidoo.com, is ranked among the top 125 sites in the U.S. by traffic.

Read more about Seth and his latest venture, here. See also: Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers