In addition to its free service, Pingdom also offers a basic account for $9.95 per month, which allows users to monitor up to 5 sites. The company also offers a business account for $39.95 per month, which can check up to 30 sites. The basic account also comes with 20 free SMS alerts, while business account users can receive up to 200 alerts by text message.

"Of course, with webjay, there is a more black-and-white issue. Is the material obviously illegal or not?"

This touches on what I wrote the other day about not being able to link to Lucid 3 and other New Zealand music using WebJay. Following on from Jim's query, I'm wondering how much of popular music is available free online? For example, if I wanted to create a playlist of my favorite songs in the Billboard Top 100 this week, how many of those songs would be available to me as free links? Anyone know an estimate?

How about more 'niche' music - like for example New Zealand music? It would be really interesting to find out what is the ratio of free linkable songs (which I hereby christen with the acronym FLS) to songs you have to pay to listen to, for each genre of music. Does bluegrass for example have a higher FLS ratio than blues? The higher the FLS (Free Linkable Songs) ratio, the better.

This is an important development for the analytics industry, but also for Yahoo! If Yahoo! can successfully attract web publishers to their free service -- and it is hard to see why they wouldn't be able to -- it means the ability to gather loads of aggregate data for their behavioral ad targeting initiatives.

It will be interesting to see what effect this analytics arms race has on Google and Microsoft's offerings, and what might happen if the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal goes through.

Amie Street is an online music store that has two key features: their unique pricing model and DRM-free downloads.

The Amie Street pricing model is quite simple - all songs start free and rise in price the more they are purchased. So as the demand increass, the price goes up accordingly. At present there is a cap at which is the maximum price a track can sell for, which is $0.99.

The site overall is well designed and they highlight their key selling point nicely. However the online music store market is quite crowded. Similar competitors include Snocap, ReverbNation and BlastMyMusic. Snocap has focused on partnering with some of the biggest social networks on the web; and this is something that Amie Street should consider too. Currently Amie Street is mostly focused on selling through their store, instead of spreading throughout the web and selling via widgets and social networks. Currently the site has a recommendation service, but no sign of widgets or other distributed mechanisms.

The DRM free strategy that Amie Street has is starting to blossom in the world of online music sales. In April 2007 EMI announced a DRM-free music download offering. That is a premium service, covering EMI's entire digital catalogue, and will enable full interoperability of digital music across all devices and platforms.

However the Amie Street catalogue growth has been limited due to DRM-free being in just its initial stages. Once DRM-free is used by the other major labels and more independent labels, then look for the Amie Street catalogue to grow a lot. Indeed Amie Street could be a market leader in introducing DRM-free to a wider audience.

What do you think of Amie St? If you've used the service, please share your impressions.

Fighting Free With Free

Clearly, this is also a program that is meant to create more goodwill towards Microsoft in the developer community. For a lot of tech startups, running Windows is often not even a consideration, as they are already building their software on top of free software anyway. As Om Malik points out, the idea of using Microsoft software often didn't even cross his mind when he started his business.

It is good to see that Microsoft is trying to gain some market here. However, it seems that Microsoft is trying to fight the free software movement by giving away its own programs, while a lot of developers prefer software that is not just free, but also open source.

Why Pay for Free Music?

Trent Reznor himself questioned the viability of the 'free' music model earlier this year, but clearly, his own band has been able to make it work. While overall album sales were down last year (even when accounting for digital downloads), bands like the Nine Inch Nails have been able to leverage their fanbase and bypass the traditional music industry channels, while still making a profit.

On the Creative Commons blog, Fred Benenson asks why people chose to pay for the NIN album even though they could have had it for free. While, as he points out, ease of use is surely one reason, most fans probably simply want to support their favorite musicians by actually paying them directly for their music.

With the Kindle, Amazon has created the current de facto standard for hardware eReaders, but the market is still young enough for others to be able to regain the lead again. The fact that Sony bothered to send out press releases about the fact that it now offers 1 million free books clearly shows that the competition in the eBook market is heating up.

Sadly, most eReaders are locked down with digital rights management software, so that users can't just transfer books from one device to another. Because of this, users are locked into one store once they buy an eReader, and the availability of books in the eReader's eBook store could easily sway customers in one direction or another. While Sony offers more free books than other companies, the average price in the Sony eBook store is generally higher than the standard $9.99 that Barnes & Noble and Amazon are charging.

It is worth noting that Google only scans these free books and doesn't edit them in any form, so that they often contain spelling errors.

If you own a Sony Reader and want to access these free eBooks, you can download the necessary software here. The PRS-500, one of Sony's first eReaders, however, is not compatible with the Google Books software.

Holland-based CoffeeCompany is starting to market their menu items via their Wi-Fi networks. If you head to any of their coffee shops don't be surprised to see networks with names such as 'OrderAnotherCoffeeAlready' or 'TodaysSpecialExpresso1.60Euro'. With the help of THEY, CoffeeCompany is promoting their specials of the day and more, while humorously guilt tripping patrons accessing their Wi-Fi networks to grab another cup of coffee. Did anyone suggest this to Starbucks yet?

Will it Increase Business?

There haven't been any reports of an increase in business, but we think the idea is great! Would it tempt us to buy another cup of joe? Once we could control our laughter at the creative network names we'd be more than happy to. While it won't stop most from free-loading, we think CoffeeCompany might be on to something with this marketing technique. What creative network names would you use to market your products or services via a Wi-Fi network?

Image courtesy of Adrants

Judging from the change in business models, however, it would seem that Calgoo couldn't attract enough paying users. It's interesting that Calgoo couldn't make its 'freemium' model of free basic services and paid advanced feature work.

According to Calgoo, it is making its products available for free in order to "move to in-calendar advertising business models." While Calgoo hasn't outlined what these in-calendar ads would look like, this move is also consistent with the overall trend on the web towards advertising financed products.

As Svetlana Gladkova also points out in this context, users have simply become so accustomed to not paying for anything on the web that even charging for premium features is becoming very difficult for some companies. Calgoo must have surely felt the same pressure. In the short run, this is probably to the users' advantage.

This is definitely a service I'll use when I want to buy whole albums and can't make it down to the local, independent record store. I've always felt dirty buying music from iTunes, now I think I'll feel a little less dirty buying DRM free music from Amazon. I saw the news first at Techmeme and there's good music-industry centric coverage at Steven Finch's Crenk. See a longer, more in-depth review of the new service over at our digital lifestyle blog Last100.

The service will be free at launch (and according to co-founder Daniel Gibbons it will even be air-time free for cell phone users since the incoming calls will originate from a toll-free 800 number). Users will be limited to 500 minutes of free calls per month, though they can earn more by inviting friends to the service.

Before writing for Read/WriteWeb I wrote for a large political news website where the writing staff worked from home and were scattered across the country. We conversed with each other via IM and email, but once or twice a month the entire team would get together for a conference call using FreeConferenceCalls.com. It worked pretty well -- schedule via the web, dial in at the scheduled time, enter a 7-digit code, and go -- but undoubtedly someone would forget to show up, or would be away from their computer and have copied down the pin number wrong. A service like Lypp that calls you and is as easy as it sounds like it will be might have been welcome.

The platform, inspired by Creative Commons and the notion of open software, is a collaborative effort between WFMU and others, including KEXP, dublab, KBOO, ISSUE Project Room, and CASH Music, all of whom work to curate the music made available on the site. Instead of fearing free downloads (as the music industry typically does), the belief here is that providing free downloads will actually encourage people to purchase music. Although all the tracks on the site are free, there are links that point to full album downloads which are not. Also, FMA users have the option of "tipping" an artist when they find something they like by sending money to the artist's PayPal account.

Obviously, the FMA is not a resource where you're going to find the latest Top 40 artists or classic tunes you know and love. This is because - let's face it - by the time you've heard of a band, someone has spent a lot of money making sure you did so. In other words, if you're not interested in seeking out new music, the FMA is not the place for you. For others, however, the site will be a treasure trove of discovery. You can delve into genres and sub-genres you may have never even heard of (Sludge? Glitch? Wow, I feel old now.)

To find good tunes to download, you can choose to browse by curator or genre using links at the top of the homepage. Next to each track is a down arrow button which saves the MP3 file to your computer. You don't have to register to download files, but if you want to take advantage of the site's social features, you do. Registered users can create friend lists, leave comments, become fans of the content, write blog posts, and create mixes.

If you're not sure where to get started on the FMA, WFMU's sample collections (Volume 1 and Volume 2) are good resources.

The Free Music Archive is in Beta right now and they promise that more features are coming in the future.

On Wednesday I received a text message from AT&T. This isn't unusual if you're an iPhone owner and still on the AT&T network. However the following text message probably made just about every iPhone owner run to the nearest coffee shop with an AT&T hotspot:

"AT&T Free Msg: Your Apple iPhone now has free AT&T Wi-Fi access at thousands of hotspots nationwide, including Starbucks*. "

AT&T hotspots can be found at thousands of locations. A huge emphasis is being placed on hotspots at Starbucks due to their new partnership that converted thousands of T-Mobile hotspots into AT&T hotspots. We all know that a Starbucks can be found on just about every corner and if not, there's always Barnes and Nobles.

Can I Use it on my Laptop Too?

In my personal tests at my local Barnes and Nobles I was able to connect my iPhone without a hitch. All it took was selecting the correct Wi-Fi network and my phone number to get things going. From there, a text message was sent to my iPhone with a secure link to access the hotspot. According to AT&T the link is only valid for 24 hours. Also, if you relocate to another hotspot you'll have to request a new link. Unfortunately, copying the link into the address bar of my laptop did not allow me to access the Wi-Fi from my laptop instead of my iPhone. Will we see a work around for this in the future?

Beginning this month on the self-publishing site lulu.com, you will soon find a broad selection of some of the site's most popular free content made available via the iPaper format. There will be numerous titles offered from a variety of genres including cookbooks, biographies, photo books, books about computers and Internet, and books about arts and photography. And thanks to iPaper's ability to embed AdSense ads within the documents, content creators will now have a way to offer free e-books that also have the potential to earn them an income.

Over the next three months, Lulu will test the use of Scribd's iPaper on their site, and, if all goes well, they will then explore rolling out iPaper to include more of their site's content.