Co-creation

It’s worth taking a look at this from Newsweek. More shape-of-things-that-are-here. And the buzzphrase machine is in overdrive.

Look ma no DRM

While wandering around the 37signals space, I found this blog, Loudthinking by David Heinemeier Hansson, and came across this post.

So let me get this right. They think they make 10 times as much selling their books direct electronic in comparison with traditional ways. Go Grateful Dead. Go Arctic Monkeys.

Thin market, complex product, proves nothing, I hear you say.

But that’s not all. If I have interpreted some of the comments correctly, they sold the electronic versions in pdf format without DRM.

Wow. Careful with that ax, Eugene…..

Take the Cerado quiz on [I promised not to]

You can find it here. I saw it while reading something on TailRank that Judy Breck had posted via Smart Mobs, and just had to do it. And I scored 23. Which I can live with -)

And by going to the quiz I had a chance to see where Haystack had got to.

Four Pillars makes no sense unless we accept that there will be StumbleUpons and last.fms and haystacks. We have a foundation (which I promised to build out next week) and four pillars. But what are the pillars holding up or supporting? More later

Four pillars: More on Generation M

I shall spend some time next week building out the foundation of the four pillars, which is comprised of platform independence, device agnosticism and opensource. Once that is established, I want to place the pillars in one further context, the construction industry: the role of the opensource movement, hardware and software vendors and “in-house IT”. (Yes Doc, it’s time to revisit D-I-Y IT :-) )

But in the meantime…. I want to be able to share all the reading I do, in true blogs-are-opensource-idea-markets style. So….

In the context of the behaviours and habits of Generation M, I have found some of the research done by the Kaiser Family Foundation invaluable. You can find their latest report on Generation M here. Well worth a read, both the 1999 version as well as the 2005 one I reference here.

The importance of blogs in anchoring/framing and building metaphor

There are three big debates right now that will help shape or kill everything we care about.

  • What is the internet?
  • Who owns it and how do we pay for it?
  • What about the stuff that touches it, whatever it is, and how do we pay for that stuff?

I have taken part in many discussions on this and related issues, covering the web, telcos and cablecos, big media and music and film, copyright, intellectual property right and now digital right.

And all the debates boil down in the end to the words and images we use. if we are to protect what we care for, we need better arguments, better metaphors, better anchors and frames. And blogs are great tools to do just that.

Recent discussions about opensource and internet and the iTunes decision in France have only served to bring this out more glaringly to me.

So here’s another to throw into the pot: Dana Blankenhorn asking about the internet, following on from some posts in a separate “Cook Report conversation”. Well worth a read, just to see how much imagery matters.

Are we moving to a time when sticks and stones will hurt us less than words? Are we already there?