Free blogs, inexpensive hosting, DIY website building, social networking, free online retail …

Today, the sky’s the limit when it comes to building up your own website, blog, business or online media channel on the cheap and making it profitable.

Cory Doctorow would know. With inspiration and lots of hard work, the journalist and sci-fi author built his tech-oriented blog Boing Boing into a business valued at $18 million, and there are many like him.

In a recent essay for Locus magazine, Doctorow explains why this works: It’s rock and roll. Or, close enough, at least.

Comparing new media to cheap and dirty rock and roll and traditional media to weighty, expensive orchestral music (though he could have just as easily contrasted punk with mainstream music — the choice in analogy isn’t the point), Doctorow breaks down the formula to something we can get behind: Why spend tons of money making something good when you can make something almost as good for the fraction of the cost?

If the Internet has a motif, it is rock ‘n’ roll’s Protestant Reformation thrashing against the orchestral One Church. Rock ‘n’ roll gets lots of wee kirks built in every hill and dale in which parishioners can find religion in their own ways; choral music erects majestic cathedrals that humble and amaze, but take three generations of laborers to build.

The interesting bit isn’t what it costs to replicate some big, pre-Internet business or project.

The interesting bit is what it costs to do something half as well as some big, pre-Internet business or project.

Take Newsweek. If you wanted to launch Newsweek today, you’d probably have to spend as much as Newsweek did. Maybe more, since you’d not only have to do what Newsweek does, you’d have to somehow outspend or outmaneuver Newsweek to get there.

But what does it cost to publish something half as good as Newsweek, say, the Huffington Post? Sure, HuffPo has brought in about $20MM in venture capital, but ignore that sum — that’s how much they can sweet talk out of the world of finance. I’m talking about how much capital it cost to build and operate HuffPo. A tiny, unmeasurable fraction of what it cost to build and run Newsweek.

And how much is Huffington Post worth? A cool $112.

What does this mean?

…he continues…

Cheaper experimentation, cheaper failure, broader participation. Which means more diversity, more discovery, more good stuff that could never surface when the startup costs were so high that no one wanted to take any risks.

The moral: Invest a little, work a lot, and start rocking.

Image courtesy Invisible Hour, via Doctorow’s Craphound blog.