I had a great discussion over lunch on Wednesday with Euan Semple, David Tebbutt and Toby Moores. Euan was actually taking a look at a new product Toby has in stealth mode, but the talk over lunch was all to do with content, licensing, intellectual property and the way social networking, web 2.0 and "The Long Tail" are fundamentally changing the means of production, publishing, and more.
Tools like YouTube, Flickr, iTunes, Amazon, and the many others that embrace and interact with their community allow people to aggregate information, and add value with their comments, recommendations, and related links. Whether it's recommendations from other people who bought the book you just ordered from Amazon, reviews from other music fans on iTunes, people's contributions to Wikipedia, or the developer community for an open source product, these are tapping in to the same phenomenon. Euan recommended a good, but he said difficult, book on the subject called The wealth of networks : how social production transforms markets and freedom by Yochai Benkler. I understand he looks at how this effects economic production, democratic participation, cultural freedom and development, and argues that we need to do more to recognise and protect the benefits that it brings.
Another part of the conversation had David and Euan talking about recent sessions they'd had with the Librarians and on the topic of records management. I was surprised to hear these communities seem to be at the other end of the spectrum, wanting to protect their information repositories, rather than make them easily discoverable. We all had plenty of examples where allowing easier access adds value and increases consumption. Because of the recommendations I get, I buy more music both as albums or as individual songs from iTunes. Even though I'm on the Internet all the time, I actually read more books . We speculated on the ways film and TV material might be used if you could easily tag and publish just segments of the movie beyond the normal "container" of the film itself. The Arctic Monkeys are another prime example - allowing free access to their early material for download on MySpace has led them to a very successful recording career. In the commercial software world, at some point I have a choice of keeping my development proprietary, or going open source. Depending on the product I may get 10 or a 100 extra developers working to enhance my product.
There is no doubt that the products and services that embrace their customer community in this way will be the more successful. If you aren't doing this now, start making plans to.
And as a footnote, my brain cells aren't what they used to be. I couldn't remember the book that Euan mentioned, and I couldn't raise him while I was writing this. A quick search on Euan's book list on Library Thing, and I remembered the author when I saw his name written down. I love this new world we live in!
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