Dr. Michael Wesch, takes a close look at YouTube as an anthropological phenomenon. It's a prime example of what social collaboration on the internet can achieve (in only 4 years!) - and how it can will change things for the better. Very insightful and entertaining. Be sure to watch the whole thing. Make it your evening program tonight!
Btw, it's from the same guy who brought us this:
Robin's post has grabbed a lot of people's attention over the last 24 hours, and its not surprising. When Paolo from eVectors demo'd their technology to me I was really impressed too - in fact, the front end of the Climate Pulse example gives only a few clues about the engine that enables the curating process that Robin describes to happen.
However, my immediate thought when I saw Climate Pulse was, wouldn't this also make a good concept for an intranet?
Could it in fact be possible to shift from the idea of managing content on intranets and instead think about curating it instead? Its an interesting idea that could make intranets more relevant - just like dashboards for metrics have become popular, can we also imagine dashboards for content and activity that are curated by people, not dumb algorithms?
CNET's Josh Lowensohn on Jelli's arrival:
"Jelli's deal with Triton will put Jelli's user-picked station on FM radio, twice a day on around 4,500 stations across the U.S. This won't start until early next year though."
This is really awesome! Something that should be looked into seriously by Authorities. The Freedom of Speech, that the young generation wants, is fueled by digital technologies. And sooner or later, we have to realize, the more we supress this with meaningless laws, the more we see these kind of things. A fair law system has to come, that will let unleash full potential of this generation.
How many of us prior to the early 80s (and in some cases up until much more recently) had thought that 'ordinary' people around the globe would be able to create resources that could then be shared with the world (and some believe beyond) in a matter of seconds?
Wikipedia, one of the top 10 websites worldwide with over 60 million monthly hits in the U.S. alone, is clearly at the forefront of our Web 2.0 world. Periodically, the open source encyclopedia has altered its "anyone can edit anything" policy to deal with hoaxes and high-profile vandalism that has marred some pages.
A recent New York Times article reports that Wikipedia will now add a layer of editorial review called "flagged revisions" to entries about living people, just as they have been "protecting" pages about Obama, Britney Spears (really), and others. The fundamental challenge is balancing the need for credibility with the desire for openness that is the essence of Wikipedia's DNA. This is a major concern for many organizations that are expected to be harbingers of "Truth" (with a capital T); like CDC, National Library of Medicine, etc.
I see Web 2.0 evolving to where standard practice for knowledge or "Truth" organizations will be a balance between some protected content and mostly open content that is subject to review either formally or informally. Imagine it was your life story on Wikipedia (and maybe it is!). What balance would you want?
Free wasn’t what I expected. Its not a manifesto for simply giving everything away. Instead its a broad discussion of the economics of free and the disruptive business models that the Internet has created. As part of this, the book also looks the motivation for people to participate without compensation and behavioural economics, including the inherent conflict this creates for organisations that deal in content and intellectual property (like the media, gaming and music industries).
Free is written by Chris Anderson, editor at Wired Magazine and the author of The Long Tail. Fundamentally, if you accept his arguments, Free comes down to set of business model that depending on your viewpoint either take advantage of the Internet or force you to change how you market your products and services because of it. These are:
On the Internet, the first two models are really an extension of traditional marketing techniques - e.g. advertising on television and radio. However, the popular Freemium model is really one that has come of age in the digital Internet era. The Freemium model is particularly evident in the software industry and can be seen as a distinct variation of the direct cross-subsidy model - instead of a cross-subsidy across products purchased by a customer, a minority of premium customers pay for the majority of free customers. This is not as unfair as it sounds, since the overall scale of the user base actually benefits those premium customers but ensuring a better, well supported and scalable product.
A fourth market is non monetary markets. In a way this is a challenger to all of the above business models, if critical mass is achieved. Wikipedia is the classic example, but Anderson also includes file sharers under this banner. Unfortunately non monetary markets reflect the nature of the beast - Anderson says he doesn’t condone copyright infringement, but that in effect it would appear a non monetary digital market trumps any other kind of digital market. This is very much in the vein of Negroponte’s classic, Being Digital.
The only defence against non monetary markets appears to be related to identifying needs that the market can’t serve, such as convenience. For example, in Anderson’s view paying a small fee for a music track from a site like iTunes is much easier for the vast majority of adult users, who lack both the time and patience to deal with P2P. Alternatively, companies are faced with the choice of adopting this market as part of their business model. For example, make your profit on live events but tap into non monetary markets as a low or no cost way to promote your brand.
In this respect Anderson acknowledges that there is a fundamental different between selling things that are made atoms versus bits in the digital world. This is positioned essentially as the difference between the scarcity of the physical world and the abundance capacity of the digital environment. To be successful we need to reconcile both and the challenge is that we are a point of transition, trying to work what will be free online, what people will pay for online and how to draw a line between that and the physical world where traditional rules still apply.
Personally I thought this was a great book - the ideas above have certainly got me thinking about not only the bigger picture of the impact the Internet is having, but even my business model as a consultant (I’m actually already a participant in the free-based economy). However, I think there are still lots of unanswered questions:
These aren’t arguments against change, just a statement of the issues and challenges ahead of us.
Also, on the theme of abundance versus scarcity, I would also like to see someone write about the idea of applying the digital abundance idea inside organisations in relation to Enterprise 2.0 (a kind of “Free Enterprise 2.0” - maybe I’ll talk about this in another post one day).
As part of his own promotion of the book, Anderson did release the whole book online so it could be read gratis. Unfortunately that promotional period has expired so you can’t access the free text version of Free on Scribd anymore, but a free audiobook is still available for download.
A good web strategy continues to be the great equalizer..read the comments from the advertisers clamoring to be a part of the site. How many scenarios like that have you read about lately?
