Every time one of the free and cool online services decides to go out of business or decides I should pay to continue my use, I am reminded that I really should not expect a valued experience to be free. Neither should you.
For me, the latest reminder came from Last.FM. Last.fm is a social music service I started using in 2006. Actually, I paid for this service from the beginning – $4 a month which is pretty expensive for an online service. I like the service because of scrobbling (I am pretty sure this is spelled correctly). Scrobbling allows me to keep track of how frequently I listen to a given song and artist and combines these data from multiple sources (pretty much any digital device). It says I have listed to 183,788 songs since 2006 at the time I wrote this passage. Maybe you don’t care. However, if you did, you might imagine what it took to generate this database backend and maintain the equipment necessary to keep it going. Then there are some fees for the “free” music available through the service.
I bring this service and this reality up because the attitude of so many in my field (educational technology) seem to think content should be free. I find this annoying. They assume they should be paid for what they do (teach, consult, keynote), but evidently assume content should be donated.
You need to pay for content – you must send money, view ads, or give up your personal information, or subsidize through taxes or donations. Make your choice. It really does not matter why content is used (another example of the ends do not justify the means). If you have convinced yourself that you deserve free stuff, sooner or later the provider will be unable to meet your expectations. As some have argued, information may want to be free, but this claim fails to recognize that those who create information have the same needs as the rest of us.