Dealing with the statistical bureaus of the world's second-largest economy is even less pleasant than it sounds. So the Journal has created this well-organized, graphically effective and easy-to-use site. It organizes data by month-to-month and year-over-year presentations and users can switch from one to the other.

China Econtracker offers outlays of data based on gross domestic product, industrial value added, fixed asset investment, exports, imports, trade balance, foreign exchange reserves, consumer price index and bank credit.

It provides a source for each set of data and allows users to post the results to their Twitter account or Facebook page.

Whether your are among those likely to wind up "fighting it out with journalists at the State Council Information Office or getting lost for hours in the maze of Beijing's Internet" as Tom Orlik writes on China Real Time's post on the Econtracker, or just someone who wishes to be more informed about one of the most important economies on earth, the site looks to provide a real utility.

One commenter on the post, however, said:

"Chinese export statistics originate in individual customs declarations. These declarations include an ever expanding and now very likely statistically material amount of trade 'roundtripped' through Bonded Logistics Parks in China in order to realize export VAT refunds. One of the many reasons that this statistic, like any other in China, is simply not reliable."

Now, if you understand that enough to agree or disagree, you may not need this tool. For the rest of us, though, I still think it will prove useful, however reductive and unreliable statistical collections may be.

Government office photo by Daniel Gao | other sources: China Digital Times

Some early adopters of location services like Foursquare and Gowalla already admit that they check in to brag about all the cool places they go. Will adding location to Facebook add a new layer of economic class psychology to the otherwise relatively egalitarian social network? If I'm the mayor of the Ritz and you're the mayor of Taco Bell, how is that going to change the Facebook experience? Does it matter? More likely, I'm checking in at fancy places and you're not checking in at all.

Will the addition of a whole lot of location into Facebook make some people uncomfortable? Will it add a new element of shame to some peoples' use of the service ("I wish I could go out to dinner that often, but I guess I'm just a loser") or will it shine a light on hipster twerps that were otherwise hidden as casual connections in our feed? ("You went to RonTom's on Burnside again, get over yourself!")

Maybe being concerned about this is patronizing. Maybe not being concerned about it is insensitive. Maybe in the face of bigger problems it's entirely beside the point - but Facebook has changed millions of peoples lives in very real ways.

What do you think? There is a wide variety of responses people I've asked have had to this question. I'd love to see a broader discussion here.

In a post on the Second Life blog, Tom Hale, Chief Product Officer for SL owner Linden Lab, said user-to-user transactions in the immersive world spiked 30% over last year to $160 million, breaking all previous company records.

The company itself makes money in part by assessing a transaction fee on in-game commerce.

Additional high-points for the company included included the fact total sales on Xstreet, the Second Life marketplace, reaching $2.3 million, an 82% increase year-to-year and a 24% increase over the previous quarter. Total Linden Dollars exchanged on LindeX, the in-game currency exchange, totaled $31 million, a 9% increase over the previous year, and monthly unique users with repeat logins peaked in March at 826,214, a 13% increase year-to-year and an all-time high.

Hall said the money the company invested in customer acquisition was the hinge his economy turned on. Infrastructure improvements included a new viewer and data center. He also noted that Valentine's Day was the single largest day on their virtual currency exchange, Xstreet and theorized that the success of the movie Avatar, which was heavy on immersion, might have inspired a new wave of people to try it.

Update: Linden Lab's PR rep, Rena Grant from Edelman, contacted me to dispute the notion they charge in-game transaction fees. I have a couple of questions back to her and will clarify as necessary.

Update: Ms. Grand told me Linden charges an "exchange rate" on the virtual currency that is used for in-game commerce and they do not charge a commission on in-game commerce.

"Coming out of a lousy 2009, 2010 is looking a lot better," said Andrew Bartels, the report's author. "We see 2010 as the first year in a multi-year growth cycle. It's not a simple rebound from a downturn."

"Investments that were planned to be made were put on the shelf," he said. "PCs will do very well in 2010 as a rebound."

As the economic downturn ends, we can expect to see a rebound in mature technologies as repairs and purchases that would have normally been made were put on hold until the economic situation looked more promising. To that end, a large variety of PCs, peripherals and storage devices will make a comeback, the report predicts.

As for "smart computing", a separate report last December predicted that the technology sector was entering a cycle of tech innovation and growth called "smart computing". Bartels defines "smart technology" as "a new generation of integrated hardware, software, and network technologies that provide IT systems with real-time awareness of the real world and advanced analytics to help people make more intelligent decisions." So, basically, it's many of the innovative applications we look at here at RWW, from location-based iPhone apps to real-time diagnostic software being implemented in hospitals.

Bartel said that businesses will be able to leverage the data provided by new applications and will be able to run more efficiently, a change he said we began to see in late 2007, before the global economic downturn. According to the December report, this new area will promote growth for the next seven or eight years.

Mike Masnick followed on TechDirt with an insightful post in which he attributes some of Gladwell's confusion to the way that Anderson wrote the book. Masnick says that the book does not provide enough details on the mechanics and applications of Free. (I haven't read the book, so I can't comment on that.) Fred Wilson joined the conversation with a sharply delivered post on Freemium and Freeconomics. He gives examples of the kinds of Free that actually work.

So, as Albert Wenger wrote recently, there is "continuous confusion about free."

This is because the topic is broad, and everyone is taking a different angle. In this post, we will break down Free into three separate classes: the kind that actually works, another that struggles, and the last that can be dangerous.

Freemium: When Free Really Works

Fred Wilson nails it on the head when he identifies the two instances when Free actually works. The first instance is the service or software that offers a free trial and then converts users into paying customers. There are different flavors of this approach, the most popular being, give the basic version for free and charge for the advanced version.

An early example of this model was online email, where you got a certain amount of storage for free and had to pay for more (see more about this, though, in the section on when Free is dangerous). Other examples in this category include project management software, like 37signals, and online photo collections, like Flickr.

The second instance that Wilson identifies is the consumer service that manages to build a massive audience. Citing Facebook as an example, Wilson says, "Free gets you to a place where you can ask to get paid." He argues that because Facebook has managed to amass such a valuable asset, it is able to monetize in any number of ways. Citing Business Insider, he lists Facebook's revenue:

• $125 million from brand ads,
• $150 million from its ad deal with Microsoft,
• $75 million from virtual goods,
• $200 million from self-service ads.

Interesting that all but one revenue source here (the virtual goods) is advertising. The only thing that consumers of this Free service were willing to pay for was a supplemental service in the form of virtual goods.

In any case, the main point is that, given a truly massive audience, monetization opportunities present themselves, at the very least in the form of advertising.

Old Media: When Free Cries

It is ironic that the very thing that makes large consumer services successful also makes old media cry. Online advertising does not seem able to deliver the kind of revenue that old-fashioned subscription services did. The culprit? A drastic drop in the cost of publishing, and complete destruction of barriers to entry. Even at the turn of the century, publishing was a closed game. Today, anyone can be a publisher, thanks to the read/write Web (no pun intended).

What really angered Gladwell was Anderson's verdict on journalists. Gladwell writes:

"It is not entirely clear what distinction is being marked between 'paying people to get other people to write' and paying people to write. If you can afford to pay someone to get other people to write, why can't you pay people to write? It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for 'non-monetary rewards.' Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels?"

While this question is valid, it misses the point. It does not matter whether journalism should be free or not. The issue is that those old media profit margins are nowhere to be found anymore. And so the money dissipates, the way that the big VC money from the '90s can no longer be deployed in tech.

To answer Gladwell's question, journalists will still get paid, but they will get paid to work at smaller outfits, like ReadWriteWeb.

Free, abundant content and more nimble, agile news sources from the blogosphere and Twitter are striking a deadly blow to old media. Old media cries because it can't figure out how exactly to remain the way it was. Ultimately, it can't.

Monopoly: When Free Bites

Most of the discussion around Free focuses on the freemium model and media. When we wrote about Free earlier, we focused on a different side of it: how Free can be dangerous.

The problem is that large companies can exploit Free in a way that is essentially monopolistic. A large company could enter a brand new market to undermine competition. Consider Google Docs, a completely free consumer product that serves no ads and competes with Microsoft Office. A subtler example is Gmail, which does display ads (even if they don't attract many clicks) and has limited storage, but the limit is so high (2.5 GB) that the product is essentially free.

Free can also be used to kill off competition and create a barrier to entry. IBM was the main player behind the open-source project called Eclipse, a platform for building software applications. Seemingly innocent and even good for the world, the initiative managed to kill off all of the small and mid-sized players in the market within five years. In doing so, it killed innovation and became the de facto tool for building Java applications.

When I spoke about the danger of Free during a recent summit on Freeconomics, I brought up a point that did not seem to resonate with the audience. I wondered, what are the moral implications of Free, and what specific impact does Free have on children? For example, what is it like to grow up in a world in which most software is Free? Does Free create a sense of entitlement? Does it lead people to wonder why they should pay for anything at all? Where do we draw the line on what should and should not be free? These questions are not simple and are certainly far from being answered.

Conclusion

Clearly, Free and Freeconomics are broad and complex topics. No single post could begin to address all of the issues involved. Anderson's book is timely and important. While we need to be careful, Free is also inevitable. Not only is it our future, it is already our present. So we need to understand what it is and what impact it has on the Internet, our lives, and our children.

The debate that is unfolding around Free is fascinating to follow and even more fascinating to participate in. So join the conversation with your posts, comments, and tweets!