I am all for the free stuff. I liked Kazaa, I love open source stuff, I have some cd’s that people burned for me, and I love getting the free cracker samples at Sam’s Club with the little pieces of cheese on them…they really are tasty. But here is a newsflash kiddies, here’s some macro economics in a nutshell…everything isn’t free. Sometimes, in order for people to make ends meet and feed their families, they have to CHARGE MONEY FOR WHAT THEY PRODUCE. Novel idea isn’t it?

I think we have all gotten a little too comfortable living our “I can get anything for free on the in-ter-net” lifestyles with our pirated music, copied software, and open source everything. We don’t want to pay for anything anymore. We want to use it, and we want to praise it as long as it is free, but once a company tries to introduce a fee for service model, the record player starts skipping and the room is suddenly empty.

The latest example is good old Meetup.com, which has been the golden child of the sites designed to facilitate offline meetings through online tools for the past 18 months or so. Recently, Meetup decided that giving away their services for free wasn’t sending them down the fast track to profitability, so they decided that Meetup organizers should pay a fee of $9-$19 to organize events through their site. Seems like a pretty reasonable thing in my opinion. I don’t personally use Meetup, but I have played with it and it seems pretty powerful. If, as event organizer, you are organizing events once per month with 10 people attending and you ask them all to chip in, $2 is very very reasonable for what you are getting.

This sentiment is apparently not shared by others, as there was immediate (and predictable) backlash from groups such as these Seattle bloggers who were appalled that they had to pay upwards of 8 quarters a piece to organize their event. These geniuses actually think that it makes more sense to build their own tool, than to pay the nominal fee and continue to use Meetup, which was the very tool that presumably got these coconut heads together in the first place.

My personal take on Meetup.com and I vocalized this to the group is that we could build our own event/organization website relatively quickly, but this would of course require volunteers and organization to pull off. The advantage of having our own meetup area would allow better exposure for all the bloggers among the group, easier sharing of OPML (containing RSS for the entire group attendees), perhaps even a shared aggregator that aggregates all Seattle bloggers blog entries, also easier blogger meetup registration and much, much more. It wouldn’t be very expensive to have hosted, and perhaps we could even get some Seattle-area hosting company to donate the necessary hosting in exchange for advertising on the site.

I noticed they reference a need for organazation if they want to accomplish the goal of creating their own site. Maybe they can use Meetup if it isn’t too much.

Meetup apologized for shitting on their little whine-up, and Peter Caputa thought it was nice that Meetup at least left the offending post up. I think both are being a little too nice here. These twits are acting like communist retards. Pay the fee and support a good product and stop whining.

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