I told you I enjoyed reading Dreaming in Code, Scott Rosenberg’s recent book; I told you I was going to start reading his blog, Wordyard.
I kept my word. And I’m still enjoying it. To give you a for-instance, here’s a quote from a piece Scott wrote on MySpace and success:
Here we have the state of Web development today: Your site’s massive success gets treated as a bug by your server; and the feature your users love best is something your programmers forgot to block.
Maybe we’re really going to see something different after all, as the software industry discovers co-creation and something analogous to user-generated-something-as-long-as-it’s-not-content.
Scott’s comment makes me think. Think about three things.
- today’s safety valves are tomorrow’s bottlenecks as we move closer to the customer. Safety is in the eye of the beholder, the customer.
- one man’s feature is another man’s bug. As traditional marketing and sales move out of the way, and customers are left to discover value for themselves, we are going to see a number of such unintended consequences.
- these two things are going to accelerate as the customer acquires the tools of production and co-creation.
I’m going to enjoy watching what happens to today’s abominations in IPR and DRM as this gathers momentum.