Making the decision on free subject areas

Submitted by fortheinfo on Thu, 06/22/2006 - 7:51pm.


Since we're starting the book 102 Free things for your Computer, we need to decide on which areas to focus on. There were two questions we needed to answer:

  1. Are we going to include online and offline resources?
  2. What subject areas should we cover?

The first question is easy to answer. Most computer users have some sort of access to the internet , whether it is at home or at work. This means that we can offer online resources to help people. We're going to ensure that the resources work well with dial up users, since not everyone has broadband yet. 

The second question is a little tougher to answer. Do you want the list of subjects to reflect the type of free service or product? For instance, software/hardware/service. Do you want the list of subjects to be grouped by topic? Finance/education/sports. You could even group them by age group if you want. Tough decision. 

To decide how to group the free items for the book we determined that the typical reader is going to buy the book in order to do things. To make it easier and logical for the reader we've decided to go by a subject breakout. Here's a list of the subjects we'll cover:

  • Finance
  • Home
  • Education
  • Sports
  • Fun
  • Personal
  • Computing

The delineation between the subjects will become more apparent, but at first brush it's going to offer the reader a quick method to determine where they'd like to look.  

Quick figuring shows that 7 subjects and 102 entries will break down to an average of 14 or so free things per category. Â