In a previous post I defined a freemix publisher as:

A non-fiction freemix publisher is a Digital Inhabitant who has a free, continuously updated blog, sharing information, in a network, about their particular area of expertise, generating an income from activities related to that blog.

and, building on that, the freemix business model like this:

The freemix business model is for the producer of products and/or services to give them away and to make money from activities related to doing so.

Then based on everything gone before, here’s my first attempt at a definition of a freemix economy, which lies in the overlap between the commercial and sharing economies:

A freemix economy is one in which a) commercial entities aim to leverage values from a sharing economy or b) sharing entities build a commercial economy surrounding them to better support their sharing aims.

(This is based on reading Lawrence Lessig’s book Remix: Making Art And Commerce Thrive In The Hybrid Economy (2008), available in a “CCfree” version at Bloomsbury Press, in which he notes “Commercial economies build value with money at their core. Sharing economies build value, ignoring money.”)

And then I think the economy of my “cldwrld” is a freemix economy.  For example, flickr started off as an example of part two and now, after being bought by Yahoo! is an example of part one. In both cases the freemix business model is used. Similarly with Youtube, which was bought by Google. Second Life is an example of the freemix business model which falls under part one.  All of the examples are examples of the personal cloud – my personal data is stored somewhere “in the cloud.”

This is good news because now I can work out whether a company belongs in cldwrld or not. For example, Facebook as a corporation is a cldwrld company. It started out as a sharing entity building a commercial economy around it to better support its sharing aims and is now a commercial entity aiming to leverage value from a sharing economy.

But primarily this is a good way to understand the present and future direction of companies, like Facebook, and people (like freemix publishers) as the news comes out in the “papers” (there’s a word). They are either going one way or the other or crossing over and the ol’ compare-and-contrast with other companies and people will be useful.

So I think that’s the whole framework of cldwrld done. Thanks for your patience!

3/24/10 corrected definition of freemix business model.