Kevin Kelly, a Wired co-founder, recently wrote a very interesting piece about the digital economy called Better Than Free. It starts from the postulation that the internet is a giant copying machine. Anything that can be copied and distributed for free becomes worthless (in a financial sense). And, therefore, anything that can't be copied acquires value.

Sounds like common sense, right? But it strikes at the heart of the old order where people were willing to pay for mass-produced copies of stuff. Of course, it is still possible to pay for the convenience of a book, for example. Inexorably, though, online is trumping offline in an increasing number of situations.

But Kelly proposes eight categories of valuable and non-copyable activity. If he's right, and he's thought about these things more than most, then his suggestions provide a series of guiding lights for those of us who are still floundering in the internet economy.

He calls these values 'generatives'. To quote him:

A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold.

His categories are: immediacy; personalisation; interpretation; authenticity; accessibility; embodiment; patronage and findability. Most of them probably make intuitive sense to you, but do read his explanations, they deliver real insight and understanding. To clarify a couple of the more obscure ones: 'Embodiment' means an analogue version of the digital entity - a book or a musical recital for example; and 'Patronage' relates to paying a reasonable amount to the originator.

In this new world, value is being derived from essentially human skills rather than mechanical processes. We are not talking about a new bandwagon for wheeler-dealers to jump on, we're talking about being rewarded for genuine intellectual or physical effort which delivers real value to the buyer. Something which should resonate with most IWR readers.

(Hat tip to Jack Rickards for the tip-off.)