In high school, I had this economics teacher, Mr. Masiello, who used the acronym TINSTAAFL so often that it became one of the few dozen things from high school (that were school-related, at least) that I can recall at a moment's notice. Additionally, it's something I think about all the time throughout my work life. If you're not familiar with TINSTAAFL, it stands for "There's no such thing as a free lunch." As much as I try and disprove it, there's always a way, seemingly to prove that it is indeed reality. Such is most certainly the case with what many people like to refer to as "Web 2.0"-ish services, but they should be more properly described as collaborative or "sharative" if you will.
Let's take the wiki as the prime example. Wikipedia and a number of other useful sites have cropped up in recent times and have changed how people use the Web for information and reference, and provide an excellent jumping-off point for finding most items you could possibly looking for. The real value behind a Wikipedia is that there are people spending hours and hours - unpaid hours - filling it with content, links, and other assorted data points. So what's the deal there? You want to use Wikipedia, sure it's "free" for you the user, but if you look at it a little more "whole"-istically, for the service to be successful, the group of us, the users, have to attempt to stay on top of things we know about, as a group, and continually make things happen. Sure, you can freeload and just use it as a reference point, but you've still got to do a little bit of due diligence and put in an effort to make sure where the Wikipedia source has led you is helpful or not. It's by no means the be all, end all, answer guide, as simple as it may be to look at it that way.
If I've led you astray at this point, don't fret. Let's loop back into the point of all this. Earlier today, I caught this post over at Lifehacker about LyricWiki, a free site where people can put up the lyrics to songs they know about, to share for everyone. In case you hadn't noticed, searching for song lyrics on the 'net leaves you awash in popup advertisements, multiple click-throughs to get what you want, and much more. Now while the RIAA (as mentioned in the LH comments section) and other groups might not like that the lyrics are out there, and that this could get hit hard should someone choose to sue for republishing lyrics, I really doubt that someone would come down on a service like this, as long as it didn't try and move to a for-profit status. In fact, the ad-filled sites would be much more likely to get slammed, and I can also see a lot of people being much more interested in seeing what a collaborative site, one they could contribute to, would bring to the table. So for those popup-happy sites, their business now has competition, from a source that they might not have seen coming - the "rank and file."
In a way, the whole "honor system" that's used for everything from charity lollipops on store counters to bringing back the gas can to the local gas station when you run out of fuel on the highway is relevant in a Webspace such as this, and for the most part, people don't think twice about contributing when they have something of value to add. Sure, it's manipulatable, and isn't always perfect, but it's here, and usable. So take a penny lyric, leave a penny lyric.
