In a post at the Social Software Weblog, Barb Dybwad joins the recent round of online discussion of Web 2.0, starting with praise for the relatively simple definitions offered by Richard MacManus and Susan Mernit, which we cited in an earlier IPD post. In addition to her insightful comments, Barb’s post features two helpful graphical depictions, one of which positions a wide range of web services on a grid defined by two axes: “social—individual” and “established/familiar—discovery/serendipity.”
Barb suggests that “remixability and innovation…is the primary key of Web 2.0. The flexibility and modularity of the building blocks of Web 2.0 are lowering the barriers of participation drastically. As more and more people can play while needing less and less knowledge of the technical underpinnings of the tools, the potential for radical innovation increases enormously.”
I think the most interesting aspects of Web 2.0 are new tools that explore the continuum between the personal and the social, and tools that are endowed with a certain flexibility and modularity which enables collaborative remixability — a transformative process in which the information and media we’ve organized and shared can be recombined and built on to create new forms, concepts, ideas, mashups and services.
One of the early lessons that pioneering Web 2.0 services like del.icio.us and Flickr taught us is that information that we organize well for ourselves has a very happy serendipitous side effect, in that it also tends to make that information more useful to other people. The tools of Web 2.0 exist in this interplay between information we organize for ourselves and that which we share with others.
We no longer have time to labor over presenting information in different ways for different contexts, and the technology of open web standards has enabled a far easier repurposing of information. . Here’s the beauty of RSS — publish once, syndicate anywhere.
On the democratizing and decentralizing elements of Web 2.0:
Robert Young elucidates this concept rather well. There is a tension between business and community, and Web 2.0 is pulling hard towards inverting traditional power structures downwards. Companies create the code and the frameworks, but more and more, users are creating the content, the culture, the true value of the systems they inhabit. Wise companies will realize they must be extremely proactive about sharing power and control with their users, because real people investing real time and energy have real emotions, and when angered by perceived loss of control will quite simply take their time and energy elsewhere, leaving empty, valueless code and frameworks — no matter how “functional” or “useful” they may appear in an objective sense. Wise companies will also realize that innovation need not come only from within the walls of the corporation, but will also be coming in droves from their users.
The culture of hackability and DIY is part of this inversion of control. We’re moving away from the days of “one size fits all” and monolithic tools developed to try and please everyone, into an era of user-centric, user-configurable tools — because the tools we’re now using have an architecture of flexibility that allows hyper-customization at the individual level. The long tail is another manifestation of the inversion of control, in which a coalition of small markets is starting to wield a level of control comparable to popularity, hit-driven markets. The rise of the Creative Commons and challenges to intellectual property and copyright are also about the inversion of control, in which individuals and groups are bypassing traditional media rhetoric of ownership and control and creating our own culture in which media has more value, not less, when remixed and recombined. This is successful because the internet has democratized methods of distribution, and we need not wait for “culture” to be handed down from on high by broadcast media. We create culture; we are culture.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 8:24 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Brad Hill at the Unofficial Google Weblog considers the pros and cons for broadcasters in making programs available using Google or online streaming services.
Citing “Google’s headline-inducing acquisition of ‘Everybody Hates Chris,’” Brad says “Google has reportedly signed an agreement with UPN to provide streaming access to already-aired TV shows, and is in discussion with the always forward-thinking BBC.”
Though he sees the potential for “a tug of war,” since “[p]resenting free access to once-broadcast TV show undercuts the rerun and syndication aftermarkets,” Brad also sees signs of emerging models in which well timed and/or limited window online streaming can “help build audience during the season, and also prep the market for DVD compilations.”
Mark Prigg of thisismoney.co.uk suggests a model in which overseas viewers could pay to watch U.S. broadcast programs:
Although programmes will be free to watch at first, it is believed [Google] is developing a pay TV service that could, for example, charge British viewers a premium, to watch episodes that have not yet been broadcast here.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 5:12 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Reading today’s articles in Technology Review, News.com and ZDNet got me thinking about the implications of combining the $100 laptops being developed by MIT Media Labs (with the help of corporate sponsors including Google, AMD, News Corp, Red Hat and BrightStar), with the Wikibooks movement that aims to use the Wiki development model to create curriculums of kindergarten-to-college textbooks available at no cost in multiple languages.
As we discussed in an IPD post yesterday, the Wikibook movement has the potential to combine input from a relatively small number of geographically scattered teachers and experts with a grassroots Wiki-development network driven by “student-power.” This potential looks even more compelling when combined with Nicholas Negroponte’s vision of equipping children in developing countries with low cost, open source, energy efficient, environmentally hardened and network-ready laptops that, if need be, can be powered by a hand crank.
Speaking at an MIT conference yesterday, Negroponte referred to the goal of his One Laptop Per Child non-profit group as “open source education.” Noting that “[e]ven in the developing parts of the world, kids take to computers like fish to water,” he pointed out that “[o]nly part of learning comes from teaching. A lot of learning comes from exploration.”
According to the News.com story, One Laptop Per Child “is in discussions with five countries—Brazil, China, Thailand, Egypt and South Africa—to distribute up to 15 million test systems to children.” It is also hoping to use commercial sales to subsidize its educational agenda.
While the initial goal of the project is to work with governments, Negroponte said MIT is considering licensing the design or giving it to a third-party company to build commercial versions of the PC. “Those might be available for $200, and $20 or $30 will come back to us to make the kids’ laptops. We’re still working on that,” he said.
At the end of his ZDNet piece, David Berlind raises an interesting question:
I asked Negroponte how he felt about the Catch-22 proposition that’s created when a government like China hands systems like his out to all of its primary and secondary school students while at the same time stifling their ability to use the systems to exercise freedom of speech through technologies like blogs (the Chinese government is cracking down on bloggers). Answered Negroponte: It’s a Trojan horse…It’s no wonder that Negroponte considers this to be his life’s most important work. If he’s successful, it’ll probably put him on track for a Nobel Peace Prize as well.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 12:36 PM | Print | Comments (0)
The National Journal’s Bara Vaida has an excellent run-down of the state-of-play in the complex process of drafting new telecom legislation. The article highlights the growing lobbying war between phone companies and cable operators and recaps a few of the eleven pieces of telecom reform legislation introduced so far.
A rewrite of the 1996 Telecom Act opens up the horse-trading process to everybody in the communications business, from broadcasters to Amazon.com. Powerful Senate Commerce Committee leader Ted Stevens (R-AK) is biding his time, and won’t debut his own legislative initiative until 2006. With the big, messy issues and powerful companies involved, we’re not going to see a bill pass for a long time. Let’s hear it for the Telecom Reform Act of….2010?
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:17 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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