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As content can be copied indefinitely and distributed instantaneously across the web, web publishers need to cooperate and partner with their peers to create free content distribution networks - collections of blogs and web sites where they can freely syndicate and republish their original content. Why?

Photo credit: kiankhoon

In the rapidly changing online publishing landscape that exists today, the old mantra “If you can’t beat ‘em… join ‘em” seems to ring truer than ever. Publishers, large and small, have long tried to find effective ways to fight against those who re-use and re-publish their content without permission.

But finding site editors, webmasters who hide under a barrage of protective layers, takes lots of time and it is often as ineffective as sending out DMCA or takedown notices. Smart web publishers are beginning to realize how ineffective and time-consuming is to continue to send these draconian cease-and-desist letters to those republishing their content, especially if they want to survive and thrive in the future.

This problem is not limited to independent web publishers however. The video game and movie industry have been fighting this same loosing battle for years. Even today there is a report that the Sony Blu-ray DRM has been broken and Chinese pirates are moving unauthorized copies of HD discs.

If DRM doesn’t stand a chance while scraping and RSS republishing become easier by the hour, what chance do web publishers have in hoping to control the unlicensed distribution of their content?

None. But…

The time has come for publishers to embrace change. The creation of new online content distribution networks, through which content can be easily shared and freely re-published, may be the possible road to their salvation.

If you think about it, sharing online ad revenue between content publishers can create new monetizing opportunities / revenue streams and partly recoup the revenue loss caused by the above listed unauthorized content republication practices.

Sharing online ad revenue through partnerships with other publishers… bloggers… and others, who would take their content and re-publish it anyway, could indeed be for many, the very best course of action.

Here, all the details:

Introduction by Andre Deutmeyer

Atomized Content: The New Reality

Publishers today face a changing online landscape, one in which users are taking control of how and where they view content. Rather than going directly to the destination sites of specific publications, users discover content through blogs and other non-traditional sources. These new publishers often re-purpose and sometimes completely republish content without attribution.

Industry observers have called this development the “atomization” of content, and many believe it poses a significant challenge to publishers. “It is potentially more disruptive to big traffic sites than Web 2.0 was,” says Steve Rubel, SVP and Director of Insights at Edelman Digital. “If almost all content can be lifted from one spot and placed somewhere where it’s more convenient to the user, just how will it be monetized? The ramifications reach far and wide.”

With these new realities come new opportunities. Forward-thinking publishers are already embracing the trend, freeing up their content to be distributed off of their destination sites. This strategy allows you to increase offsite ad revenue, drive more traffic to your site, and find new opportunities for licensing and syndication. This whitepaper looks at the ongoing changes and suggests ways you can survive and thrive in this evolving content landscape.

Extracting Value From Offsite Content Distribution

The rise of atomized content requires fundamental changes in how you deliver content to your consumers. “The challenge is that [publishers] will lose control of their distribution systems,” explains a recent report from Jupiter Research. “But…those who try to retain control of their distribution will likely fall behind their competitors.”

Still, letting content “go free” does not mean giving up ownership or copyrights. Nor does it mean that you will be creating articles, images, and videos, only to have third parties benefit from them. Instead, you have merely relinquished control over where your content appears. To compensate for this, you need new ways to profit from the offsite appearance of you content. These include valuable editorial insights and innovative monetization strategies, such as link building, licensing, and ad revenue sharing.

Gaining Insights From Web-wide Visibility

The first step in developing an offsite content strategy is to find out who is re-using your content and in what context. With technologies available today, you can closely track the republication of articles and other assets, wherever they appear the Net.

One advantage of this increased visibility is a deeper understanding of what your customers want. This is particularly valuable for publishers that syndicate their content. For the first time, near-real time metrics on how your licensees are using your content are available, enabling you to tailor your content offerings, identify upsell opportunities, and increase revenue. For example, Reuters recently reported that content tracking enabled it focus on more popular styles of articles. “We have been a little surprised [online readers] are moving more toward fluff stories, infotainment,” says Reuters’ Maria Molland, SVP and Global Head of Strategy and Business Development. “As a result we are putting a lot more editorial resources behind sport and lifestyle.”

Links as the Currency of the Web

Traditionally, links have been considered a method of attribution or branding your content. While this still holds true, a process called link building offers a significant opportunity for increasing traffic and revenue. Simply put, link building involves getting other sites to link back to the original appearance of an article, image or video.

For leading web sites, link building is one of the most powerful traffic-generation tools available on the Internet today. The reason is not merely because readers click on links and bring your site direct traffic. Far more important is the effect that links have on search engines. Most publishers today receive a substantial portion of their visitors from keyword searches on sites like Google or Yahoo. A great example is The New York Times, where search drives more traffic to its site than any other source.

To understand the role link building plays in increasing such traffic, it is necessary to understand how search engines work. Search engines continually scan the Internet cataloging the content for leading web sites. For each set of key words search engines return a list of results. These results are based on complex algorithms to assess how important or relevant each site is. The sites the search engine deemed most valuable by the search engine are ranked first.

The number of inbound links to a site is a very important factor in determining this ranking, mainly because links help search engines assess how authoritative a site is. Experts in the field often refer to this quality as “domain strength.” While there are many contributing factors, sites that have many links to them, in general, have greater domain strength than those that do not.

By tracking the use of your content off your destination site, you can identify opportunities for link building. Many bloggers and other non-traditional publishers are not as careful about providing attribution as they should be – reports indicate that 50-65% of all republished content does not link back to the original web site. By securing a link whenever your content is re-purposed, you can increase the authority of your site. That, in turn, can drive additional search traffic and increased revenue.

Unlimited Licensing Potential

As a publisher you are almost certainly interested in reselling content to other media outlets. But finding potential partners in this field can be a challenge. How can you identify sales leads? Which ones are potentially valuable, and which are not worth the effort?

By gaining insight into who is republishing your content, you may be able to discover publications or media outlets who are good potential partners. An additional advantage of offsite tracking comes after licensing agreements have been reached. By learning how your licensed content is being used, you can optimize your content offering.

Advertising That Follows Content

There is little doubt that the Internet is being propelled by advertising. According to IDC, U.S. online advertising totaled over $25 billion in 2007, representing a 27% increase over 2006.

Savvy publishers are demanding that the commercial sites repurposing their content also share ad revenue. This approach can be particularly useful when dealing with smaller sites that lack the traffic and resources to qualify for a licensing agreement.

The technology to share revenue exists today on platforms such as Google AdSense that allows you to receive ad revenue automatically, regardless of where your content appears. In this model, you would set your content free, but attach an ad sharing agreement to it that follows the content whenever it is used.

The result will be a new and vibrant content marketplace, where publishers benefit regardless of where their content appears.

Originally written by Attributor.com and first published in March 2008 as Set Your Content Free (and Monetize It) - [PDF] - Reprinted with original author permission

Photo credits:
Atomized Content: The New Reality - SSilver
Gaining Insights From Web-wide Visibility - vacuum3d
Links as the Currency of the Web - Danabeth55
Unlimited Licensing Potential - logos
Advertising That Follows Content - vacuum3d

How can you, as a customer, get more engaged and involved in the process that defines the very product you are holding in your hands? How can you actually participate in the very definition of the traits that will characterize a product you like?

Photo credit: Mikkel

Have you ever desired to get more from an item you purchased? To explore its possibilities in order to get the best out of it? Have you ever said: “I surely would have known how to make this better if they only had listened to me?”

According to marketing expert Mikkel, a time has come where the old-fashioned relationship between business companies and the customer will no longer suffice. A new production cycle is arising, where the end user takes control in the process of creating new products, and plays a crucial role in shaping that very product to suit her needs.

The more a company allows its customers to express their creativity on a brand new product, the more desirable that product will look to the target audience. The customers won’t have the feeling of buying something already pre-packaged, but they will rather be more likely to perceive a product which has multiple dimensions and benefits and which can provide a unique experience for each single user.

In this insightful report entitled “The Co-Creative Consumer”, marketing expert and web-designer Mikkel takes you into a journey exploring the emergence of a positive collaboration between consumers and brands creating products and services for them.

Here the full report in its entirety:

Intro by Daniele Bazzano

The Fragmented World

Businesses once had the control: they would develop a product which they advertised, then waited for people to buy it. Besides the necessary means of communication to make a sale, the businesses didn’t interact much with it’s surroundings. The economist Milton Friedman nailed this way of thinking with the words: “The business of business is business”, an expression of a business being a closed and independent entity.

In the previous 30 years, it’s however been discovered that many things influence the business, and that it may even influence it’s surroundings back. Now the talk is of the Corporate Citizen, en expression of the business being a part of, and being responsible to, the surrounding society and that it therefore must behave ethically correct.

This pattern of thinking originates back in the 1960’s growing ideology of holism: that everything is connected. It began in the spiritual awakening in the western world, but spread into more tangible areas like politics and consumer behavior. This was the beginning of a long term trend towards less faith in authorities, which reflected in many different areas of the societies, and culminated in the “fragmented world” as we know it today.

From the beginning of this change in paradigm, it certainly wasn’t all businesses that welcomed it: instead, an industry of consultants and writers began to advise the businesses to direct and control the slowly increasing loss of authority and the accompanying criticism. Companies understood that many factors could influence them, and they invented concepts such as image in order to control it. Thus they ran against the wind and fought the change, by hiring spokespersons and Public Relations directors to handle communications and image, but most of all to erect a breakwater against the criticism of outsiders. Businesses realized that boundaries disappeared, but reacted by re-erecting them. Even today we have not seen the climax of this peculiar contradiction in business communication.

Businesses today are keenly aware that there is little distinction between itself, its customers, its employees, the surrounding society and many other factors. They use concepts such as:

• Autocommunication
• Integrated Communication
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Ethical (Social) Accounting

They’re all expressions of this holism. From Milton Friedman’s “the business of business is business“, the “business” of a company today is almost everything. Therefore there’s been an enormous increase in the amount of communication which the business must relate to, both that from it’s surroundings but also that which it transmits (and emits).

But businesses struggles to control their image (and with how to do it), their products and the amounts of communication. The term “fragmented communication” is used about a business that is unable to coordinate it’s communication, mostly outwardly. The ideal is controlling employees and departments so only the information which the management has green-lighted, gets out.

The problem is however that control is practically impossible - the technology is too advanced and the respect for authorities is too low. So an increase in the amount of communication has happened - and since the businesses desire to control and direct communication, there is so much more to monitor and control. The desire to control an increasing amount of information, results in the need to become “omnicommunicative“: watch and communicate about almost everything. The more “omnicommunicative” a business becomes, the more there is to monitor and control - and a negative spiral has begun. I wrote a bit about this in Information Overload.

There’s also been a dramatic increase in the amount of criticism of and animosity towards businesses. As mentioned above, the mix of the technological democratization and a lower faith in authorities, has made it prevalent to manipulate with a company’s products, or scrutinize it’s communications and internal conditions.

More important - the perpetrators and critics could be employees, customers, competitors or complete outsiders. They will investigate the company and it’s products, spread stories and find secrets which the company would rather not have published. A bit will be false rumors, but most will be the accounts of frustrated customers about bad service and products, publishing of confidential notes or rumors conveyed by employees. The newest official statements will be compared to earlier ones, the personal lives - past and present - of key officials will be googled, press announcements will be commented out of proportion, rumors will arise out of thin air and for a short moment be regarded as truth.

There’s so much of this criticism, that control is impossible - it doesn’t even make sense to talk about “fragmented communication” (nor “integrated“) any longer. We have to talk about the “fragmented world” or society, which is the new condition that everyone must work within: a uncontrollable world where everyone that has an opinion of the company, also is a part of it.

Attempts to direct and influence this fragmented world, for instance through PR-people, will fare badly - one cannot control a fundamentally uncontrollable world - at least not without losing ethical capital. The Internet contains plenty of examples of businesses that has attempted to edit, direct, correct and manipulate the communication that concerns them. The consequences has only been negative attention and a reduction of their ethical capital in the eyes of their customers and other parties. By trying to protect their reputation, they’ve hurt it.

Living in Chaos

Every mistake the business commits, and every injustice that random interested parties claim or believe to have been committed, will be published. Therefore the business can not wait for the criticism to arise and grow, but it must seek out the criticism, in order to answer and deal with it before it grows too big. This is not meant to suppress or manipulate the criticism, but to recognize “just” criticism, explain the business’ dispositions and choices, kill false rumors and generally engage in a dialogue.

The result of such a behavior will be a better image, deeper contact to customers, interests and the business’ surrounding world, which is vital to running a business the next many years.

Pirate copying will be a condition of existence that can not be avoided either - the clever business will even draw lessons from the pirates or at least accept them as a permanent existence. In it’s essence, piracy means that products and public relations materials will be copied and/or used in other ways then the business had intended.

• In one end of the scale, it means that a logo or product photos is used by third parties, for example, for presentations, ads or on webshops - and often distorted to bad quality or with inappropriate colors. If anything good can be said of this, it would be that the “perpetrators” do it to celebrate your business or to facilitate sales of your products.
• In the other end of the scale, it means that the (copy-) protection of technological or software products is bypassed, and that they perhaps are then modified to the benefit of the consumer. Modification of physical objects soon becomes, with the advent of the 3D-printer, so accessible that unhappy or curious consumers will disassemble the business’ products, copy the parts and build a modified version.

  First they’ll be based on plastics but later also of metal and wood, and all sorts of mechanical or static objects could be altered: the user will simply either insert the object in, or download a schematics to, a copy machine which then produces a physical copy. Already the Internet contains many guides to do it yourself in your very own way of adjusting or using products in alternative ways - for example Ikea-furniture.

Releasing and copying equals publicity and for small producers it may be the only way ahead: movie producer Eric Wilkinson’s Man From Earth didn’t have many chances before it was copied, uploaded to the internet and mentioned on the pirate-news service ReleaseLog - which regularly links to obscure movies that mainstream media won’t touch. Instantly the buzz exploded across the net: it got good remarks from those that downloaded it, and Wilkinson even wrote a thank you note to ReleaseLog who naturally published it as a form of legitimizing piracy.

But the method of free releasing has already been used in music: big names such as Prince, Nine Inch Nails, and Radiohead can naturally best afford to release free albums, and do so as political or societal statements. But also small artists can to a degree live from distributing parts of their music for free and are angry at the established music industry.

Unleash Creativity

Apart from the fact that attempts to control may end with a negative reputation, it also ignores a huge vein of creativity: the business has to realize that it’s solution not necessarily is the best.

Basically, the historic development has gone from custom-made over mass-produced to customized. The lessened attention to authorities means that consumers to a lesser degree will accept a mass produced product, but desire some form of individualization. On the other hand, other consumers not only want an individual product but rather a creative experience from (de-)constructing the product: the entertainment and challenge from producing new content to the game can be far greater than playing the game itself.

Especially within computer games, companies have found that “modability” (modification ability) dramatically increases the consumers’ satisfaction, the lifespan of the product and for these reasons slightly increases sales. Around the games, little active communities arises of users producing small programs, mods that can be implemented in the game and thus give it added or new functionality such as new rules or looks.

Computer games such as The Sims, Spore, or Little Big Planet which contains various tools for creative expression and/ or content creation, find that a group of customers doesn’t even play the game itself but rather produce content for it. Others find that the less linear the game is, and the more free choices it offers, the better the customers like it.

The bottom line is that the function of the original product which the consumer didn’t like, she can now change by implementing a “mod” or following instructions made by other consumers. The business has thus, without further investment, has an unhappy customer turned to a happy one. The more creativity and freedom the product offers, the greater value it’ll have - because customers owning the product can produce more content for the product.

Michael Yon is the best PR-worker of the American army, despite his presence being unwanted by some, and the fact that he’s not even in the military! US army has for years used “embedded reporters” to achieve a better image: the philosophy is that the closer the journalist is to the action and to the soldiers, the better coverage and sympathy will he convey.

Unfortunately the army is not happy with the reports of most journalists, and most journalists aren’t happy with the Iraq/Afghanistan war or the military itself - a really bad match. That’s why the former special forces soldier and now self-made journalist Michael Yon is the best asset the army could desire: He’s always at the very front line, and has great sympathy for the soldiers and civilians and enjoy their respect. He utilizes his knowledge of the army to get “under the skin” of everyone, and for describing the action - and people involved in it - which is valuable when one needs to find out what’s really going on. Among other things, Yon could see how, long before most others could, the center of the war would change from Iraq to Afghanistan. And the army doesn’t even pay him to do all this - his readers do.

Neil Gershenfeld is behind FabLabs, which brings semi-advanced tools to local communities and let people experiment and build. At TED06 Neil talked about kids that made better solutions than scientists: how his term “technology of one” or “personal fabrication: products for a market of one-person” is

1. An extreme way of utilization of creativity
2. An effective form of aid
3. A new way of producing good, and to view a product life cycle.

CoCreation - Maslow’s For Businesses

Click above to enlarge the picture

Psychologist Abraham Maslow devised the human hierarchy of needs: that we need sleep more than friends, and that we can only concentrate on playing music after we’ve had a bite to eat. The fundamental factor is thus the cumulative amount of resources. Above is a graphic of three pyramids:

1. First Maslow’s original hierarchy of needs
2. Then my interpretation of it for use with businesses
3. And lastly one for use in relation to products and customers and the relationship between them.

As the hierarchy of needs is true for an individual person, it’s also true for a business: without tools and employees there’s no reason to have a PR-strategy: but the more needs of the hierarchy that are fulfilled, the more successful the business can become.

The hierarchy of needs also pertains to customers: they need to receive and be able to use the product, but if there’s no possibility of having it repaired, there’s less reason to buy it. The more individual needs a product fulfills, and the better it fulfills them, the more reason to buy it.

According to Maslow’s for businesses there’s an increasing element of involvement between the customer and the product she buys: the more it allows her, the more value it has to her. A product should ultimately and preferably fulfill up to and including the top field in the blue pyramid. “Maslow’s for businesses”, as it’s pictured above, is fundamentally true, but an important exception is that some products may well fulfill certain fields better than other fields. The more fields of the pyramid a product or service fulfills the more desirable it is to the customer, and the fewer fields the product fulfills the better it has to be in these few fields, in order to be competitive.

In reality this shows as branding: a certain angle is given to a product by the producer:

• One phone has a stylish or weird design
• Another phone is very easy to use
• A third phone has exceptional service and is of a sturdy quality, etc.

Systems and solutions that leave the control to the customer, according to the top field in the hierarchy, are the products that will win. Today it’s mostly seen in customization options such as:

• Building your Toyota
• Configuring a new Dell-computer
• Coloring your Nike shoes via a web interface

Even though the product in itself is not allowing any form of creativity, it may achieve a competitive advantage if it is “attached” such a possibility in a PR or sales situation.

The New Ideology

The new age is not as much about technology, but mostly about the ideology surrounding web 2.0. Businesses use the new media but doesn’t understand their nature - that’s also true for the companies I just mentioned above.

However, it’s especially true for news media: the printed and TV publications dwindle while the online versions struggle to find the correct format and use of the internet - and journalists are secretly bewildered as to what their role is in this new world. The large majority of businesses (and media) don’t understand the very important fact that consumers expect to be engaged in a different way then 10 years ago, that monologue has been replaced by dialogue and that mass production has been replaced by individualization. And the word dialogue should be understood both in terms of communication, product development and support/service. The businesses that can realize and materialize the new ideology of the CoCreative Consumer, can save lots of money, develop new and better products more efficiently and faster, and make their customers happier.

The mantra is no longer that the “customer is king”, but rather that the “fan club is king”. The former slogan was about service and therefore re-active, while the current slogan is about product development and therefore pro-active.

• From considering technology as developed and delivered from top to bottom, we now need to consider it from bottom and up.
• From delivering complete products, businesses must now - to a degree - deliver tools.
• From telling customers what to buy, businesses must now listen for what customers want to buy.
• From being an arranger of the customers experience, the business must now be an adviser to the customers experience.

Technology is in some cases the means, but it is never the end - a new and open thought pattern is the goal. This way of thinking implies being able to balance in chaos, not maniacally attempting to regaining control in/of chaos. The business must face that it, and its products, will be discussed, abused, stolen and criticized. However, this fact can be turned to one’s own advantage, amongst other things through utilizing the CoCreative Consumer.

Business and the New Ideology

Click above to enlarge the picture

A completely new product life cycle is arising:

• Previously the product was developed by the business after research and planning, and was considered and presented as the final result which consumers could buy or leave be.
• Now the product is a starting point for modifications, which in turn are starting point for social interaction, which in turn are starting point for new products - where after the circle is repeated.

What’ll happen in reality is that some of the customers that bought the product will modify it and then spread this modified version to friends or other customers, in the forums where they meet. The business will discover these new ways of using the product, and they will build it into new versions of the product. There is therefore synergy between the engaged customers, the CoCreating Consumers, and the business.

It’s also important to remember that Pareto’s principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, is true for the CoCreative Consumer: 20% of the customers will do 80% of the modifications, and only a handful will create the really great modifications: find them, engage them, involve them and hire them.

Future business models will far more often be based on dialogue and start with the consumer - or more precisely in the product or the business as a social magnet. Kevin Kelly and Seth Godin use the terms True Fans and Tribe Management, while the Danish Institute for Future Science terms it Creative Man. All of those means that businesses no longer mass produce to unknown customers, but instead have a close and symbiotic relationship with the most engaged ones. Far more “open” products will be made that engages the fan club and is designed to make change and modifications possible.

Therefore new business models will arise: such as ransom-systems, where the artist only produces next album or writes the next book, when the production costs have been covered by the fans. In reality, the producer and fans thus make a contract in which the consumer to a large degree is determining how the product should be - which in turn is secured a certain circulation. Another kind of business model is that one version of the product is free, while another and typically more advanced version costs money.

The CoCreative Consumer is based on procedurality: that content is created on the fly. Though the expression comes from the software industry, I use procedural creation in the sense that the producer delivers the tools and a frame which the consumer fills with content. Procedural products are thus tools and frames for creativity: a saw is not per se a procedural tool but a pencil or Adobe Photoshop is. Online services such as Ebay, Youtube or Wikipedia are based on this principle.

Access / Hindrance

The degree of modability in the product or of dialogue between business and consumer, will have an increasing impact - consumers simply won’t be hindered or interrupted. The consumer’s options for dialogue with the business or/and modability of the product will be seen as Access and yield a positive response, while the lack of Access will be regarded as Hindrance: a hostile act towards the consumer which yields a negative response.

Examples of Access can be:

• easy ways of contacting the business
• download of PR-materials or product-specifications
• forums for exchanging views with other customers or possibilities for product modification.

Access is about the business handing over control to the customer or basing procedures on that which is best and easiest for the customer.

Examples of Hindrance would be:

• Redirecting callers between departments
• Copy protecting software
• Demanding unnecessary registration

Hindrance is about the company keeping control or basing procedures on that which is easiest and best for itself.

Practical Advice

Design to Or with The Fan Club

Include the customer in product development - the prize is avoiding features that consumers doesn’t want, and instead focusing on features which they crave or even the invention of completely new products and features. The more You listen to consumers, the better a product can be delivered, bad reviews are avoided and you gain great sympathy. Note however that it’s important which customers you listen to and how you do it: they have a different agenda than You do, and the amateur-users have different agendas and needs than the professional-users.

Make Procedural Products

Build in a kind of tools, make products that are frames for creativity or allow lots of freedom. The higher on “Maslows’ for businesses” the product is, the more value and life span it will have. One of the most procedural products that exist is the pencil.

Connect to Many Networks

Physical networks can be plugs/sockets or modability: they allow the consumer to adjust the product’s function, expand it’s connections or work in alternative ways. Social networks can be conveying contact to other consumers or secondarily related groups or networks. Knowledge networks can be a library of schematics, links to relevant encyclopedia resources, or conveying consumers tips on modification.

Hire the CoCreative Consumer

Arrange “tweak” contests and encourage the alternative uses of Your products, or accept suggestions for new products - and reward the good ones. The idea is to search for opportunities and future employees - it’s not a celebration of Your business or Your products, it’s a celebration of the consumer/participants and their creativity. The people that “mod” are often long time customers or in related ways interested in Your field , and furthermore technical competent and creative: it’s amongst these that the best of Your future employees are to be found. Observe the creativity in the destruction and the construction in the deconstruction - and remember the 80/20 rule.

Embrace the Fragmented World

Be close to criticism, seek, engage and listen to those that discuss and use Your products. A new job title could be “information detective”, who’d assist Your business in surveying it’s surroundings: who mentions it, how and where? The dualistic advantage of being close to the criticism is that you’re also close to the ideas.

Employees need to have the freedom to satisfy your customers. It will always be cheaper to offer extraordinary service or re-ship a product too many than it is to anger your customer.

The media loves a good story and the internet never forgets. When problems are spotted in the horizon, quickly inform as many interested parties as possible. Safety measures rather annoys your customers than actually prevent piracy: it’s also proven that great sales are not made by copy protections, but from the product being great.

Be Like Lego

After having written the most of this article, I had the opportunity to talk to the communications boss of the Danish toy producer about their methods and how Lego views the CoCreating Consumers. I already knew that Lego likely was a relevant example to include, but I was surprised to learn that the company actually is a living example of most of what you’ve just read in this article:

1. The Lego brick, as a product, is located at the top field of “Maslow’s for businesses”, it’s an extremely “creative product”, and there are many different kinds of blocks, sets and ways to use them - even virtual ones.
2. Lego, as a company, has a very close relationship with their customers and put lots of effort into using them as a creative resource.
3. 5 years ago, Lego found out that they can no longer control their surroundings, and since then they’ve worked on adjusting to living in chaos. However, they’d still like to crush the pirates.

Don’t Be Like…

I make the last touches on this article I discover that Spore publisher EA has put a heavy copy protection on the game, and the negative reviews were being deleted from Amazon - costumers are furious! The next day it was corrected, but the damage has still been done. It doesn’t even matter why/how it happened, it only matters that customers got angry and lost faith in EA and Amazon.

First I was happy that my ideas was proven correct, but then i simply turned sad and dumbfounded. My mind began listing similar examples of negligent and stupid behavior by businesses towards consumers - and you might begin to list a few of your own. Business technology has never been more advanced - yet business behavior is still in the mud

Ordforklaring - The Dictionary

• Access / Hinderance

- The degree of interaction possibility in a product or with a business. The more Access and the less Hindrance, the more sympathy and success.

• Circular Product Development - Symbiotic relation between business and consumer regarding new products
• CoCreating Consumer - Ideology surrounding the dialogue with engaged customers. The closer a product can be developed with the engaged customers, the better.
• Fragmented World - Expression of the business’ lack of control, not even it’s own employees. The fragmented world consists of interested partied that relates to the business and which it must create a good relationship to, in order to survive.
• Maslow’s For Business - The human hierarchy of needs in relation to products: the more interaction and creativity it allows, the more desirable it will be to the consumer.
• Modability - Modification Ability: the customer’s possibility to adjust the business’ product.
• Procedural Products - Tools or frames for creativity and content, which the consumer contributes to or works with.

Originally written by Mikkel for Design Af Mikkel and first published as “The CoCreative Consumer” on July 20th 2007

About the author

Mikkel is a marketing expert and web-designer. He focuses his attention on communication techniques and how information should be provided to be as efficient as possible. On his own site Design Af Mikkel he writes: “My philosophy is about balance, about holism. About reaching each other in the best way, about doing it honestly and about having fun along the way.” Mikkel has written some valuable papers about the importance of customer engagement and “The CoCreative Consumer” is one of them.

Web 2.0 has revolutionized the panorama of the information society: users have become information producers and the new web platforms have become relationship venues where new knowledge and ideas emerge. Also the new tools of social networking, social tagging, wikis and blogs enable new forms of social interaction, participation and cooperation. But…

Photo credit: Slate magazine

• Is this participation really democratic?
• Or is this a democracy paradox, where everyone can interact but the decision making places are all outside the net?
• Is the horizontal leveling of internet communications really an instrument of democracy?
• How would it be possible to transform these emotional and communication-oriented extensions in a real space connected with the physical world of true participation to decision-making?

I have gone out and asked to four people whose intellectual integrity and life vision the above questions: Howard Rheingold, John Blossom, Michel Bauwens, Sepp Hasslberger answer the above questions from four diverse individual viewpoints:

Howard Rheingold of Smartmobs.com

1. Is this participation really democratic?

   “Democratizing” means making access (to information, tools, policy-making discussions, elections, etc.) widely available. This, however, does not guarantee a healthy democracy.

   What if more people vote, but their picture of political candidates and their policies are distorted by sophisticated public relations tools and strategies?

   What if their educations are so poor that voters are unable to think critically about partisan claims?

   I am wary of projecting hopes onto the tools you mention — which truly have the potential to inform and involve more people in democratic decision-making — without paying attention to the less visible parts of the system I mention.

2. Or is this a democracy paradox, where everyone can interact but the decision making places are all outside the net?

   I am also wary of governance by instant voting. This is known as the “plebiscite” and can be very dangerous: a demagogue or a government can propagandize people into starting a war or adopting a policy without a process of deliberation.

   That’s why modern democracies are generally republics — citizens elect representatives who are expected to deliberate openly and transparently.

3. Is the horizontal leveling of internet communications really an instrument of democracy?

   It CAN be. But more than the technology is required. A healthy public sphere is essential — most people need to have sufficient education, freedom to criticize, well-trained critical faculties, and ample sources of accurate information.

4. How would it be possible to transform these emotional and communication-oriented extensions in a real space connected with the physical world of true participation to decision-making?

   Education!

Michel Bauwens of P2P Foundation

The first level is expression, and it is clear that in this context, the Web 2.0 is a resounding success.

And it’s importance should not be underestimated since historically, we can see that people with power have always tried to limit and control expression, so we should not be cynical about it.

I think that Web 2.0 generally goes beyond expression, and has also become an efficient tool for mobilization and collective action

But expression is not deliberation. Most Web 2.0 platforms are not very well suited for the kind of complex deliberation that would be needed to create a context for decision-making. I think these kinds of tools, which can integrate complexity, adequately filter for quality, and have a value conscious design approach that insure that a diversity of views are taking into account, are still too far between, but quite a few groups are working on it

The key in politics is not expression, nor expressing discontent or resistance, but actually transforming things. Collective action can change things, but still implies a separation between the ‘people’ and ‘representative institutions‘. It implies ‘we‘ are asking ‘them‘, to change their ways.

So I think the real revolution of peer to peer technologies is that it allows people not just expression, but actually a redesign of social processes.

For example, free software communities successfully embed their values in software, and so do the emerging open design communities that are now starting to tackle physical production itself. This is the next great frontier of peer production communities.

But equally crucial, and this is why I believe Lessig made the right decision in moving from Creative Commons to Open Politics, is that we actually start redesigning politics itself.

If you see sites like worldchanging.org, or p2pfoundation.net for that matter, it is rather easy to come to the conclusion that most solutions for contemporary problems already exist, but they are scattered in marginal groups.

At the same time, the current political and economic system seems almost completely oblivious to it, and so these crucial solutions do not seem to be able to scale. This is a sign of a profound disease and insufficiency of current democratic and representative regimes, that are in the hands of privileged elites, who hide their power through a lack of openness.

The big fight now is openness and transparency.

And as we create our own P2P alternatives, we still have to tackle the mainstream system, and since a direct approach seems impossible (simply changing one party by another with very similar standard policies), what we need is to redesign, reprogram the political process itself.

That’s the crucial task right now, and Web 2.0 is not sufficient for this, it’s merely a first step.

John Blossom of Shore.com

1. Is this participation really democratic?

   While not all social media tools are available to everyone in the world, by its nature people who have access to social media are participating in the most democratic form of political human expression.

   In the past the power of a political voice was determined by a person’s connection to powerful people, by their access to the media or a bullhorn or whatever other device amplified one voice over that of an electorate’s voice. In social media the opportunity for all voices to express themselves begins to become a reality.

   However, just because social media tools are being used for political expression doesn’t mean that the content being generated by social media is always “the voice of the people.”

   Oftentimes powerful individuals and organizations will hire surrogates to spread their opinions using social media tools, creating “astroturf” - content that’s supposed to look like “grass roots” opinion but which is in fact sponsored by a controlling interest.

   What I am noticing in this year’s U.S. election is that people are far more aware of the potential for astroturf content and challenging it more quickly and vocally.

   It’s also important to note the growth of media outlets that use social media tools but which have editorial staffs that enable them to operate much as any other media publication would. Just because you’re using the tools of social media doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re actually trying to be just one voice in the crowd.

   This is not to say that the powerful should not have a voice as well in social media. In a true democracy all people of all walks of life should have a voice in political discussions.

   But if democracy is a system which says that each person has one voice as well as one vote, then all of the people who have that right should have an equal opportunity to influence their peers through social media.

   Within that framework influential figures arise, leadership forms and actions are taken based on that influence, but the influence, endorsement and leadership is not presumed. Social media is a key venue in which such influence, endorsement and leadership is formed.

2. Or is this a democracy paradox, where everyone can interact but the decision making places are all outside the net?

   In my book Content Nation I am highlighting the importance of the coffee houses and the taverns of the American colonies in which influential political pamphlets such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense were discussed.

   The discussions in those gathering places and the passing of these pamphlets from one person to another was in effect the social media of that era. Without those influential discussions and the local thought leadership that emerged from them there would not have arisen the widespread convictions that led to the actions outside of the rooms in which these discussions took place.

   Democracy is a form of self-organizing government: one cannot form it until people have organized their thoughts as to how they would like to be represented.

   So while oftentimes the discussions in social media forums may appear to be as boistrous as any that one may encounter in a pub or a cafe, that boisterousness leads to the convictions to express oneself through democratic institutions.

   Social media can enable actual decision making - many services provide polling capabilities - but its primary value is to enable people to have the intellectual and emotional interchange necessary to make informed decisions in the democratic process or to inform our representatives of the true opinions of the electorate more efficiently.

   A simple analogy can be found in and about my home town. In the New England region of the U.S. many small towns still govern themselves via direct representation: the citizens of a town gather at appointed times to vote on town budgets and regulations and to discuss and to vote upon important issues. However, as some of these towns grew this form of government gave way to representative town meetings, in which citizens are called upon oftentimes to speak out on issues of public importance at town meetings but in which the elected representatives then are called upon to vote. Both are democratic functions, but in the representative town meeting the voice of the citizens is separate from the actual political action.

   It’s feasible over time that social media will enable us to return to more of a direct representation in democratic institutions, but for now I think that it is mostly about enabling people to influence the actions of elected officials and influencing how they are chosen.

3. Is the horizontal leveling of internet communications really an instrument of democracy

   The horizontal leveling of the internet can enable democratic views of the world and is without a doubt the most revolutionary invention for human communication since the spoken word.

   Once voice can decide to speak out and can gain a global audience virtually overnight, influencing political decision making both on a national and global level as well as at a local level, based solely on the influence and endorsement of their peers.

   The ability of any voice anywhere to influence the course of decision-making that impacts society is the foundation of democratic action. The corollary of that freedom, however, is that it takes democratic organization of all of the content generated by social media for people to become aware of such opinions.

   If millions of voices shout out but we hear from the same media-selected opinion-makers again and again then social media has done little good. This is where the traditional media outlets fail us oftentimes.

   It is good to have high-quality traditional media outlets, but social media outlets enable a far broader array of opinions and insights to surface by enabling a far broader array of influencers and leaders to arise through the combined endorsements of individuals. This allows the combing intellect and insight of countless people to factor in to democratic decision making.

4. How would it be possible to transform these emotional and communication-oriented extensions in a real space connected with the physical world of true partecipation to decision-making?

To bring it back to my discussion of New England town government, there is the long-term possibility that social media becomes a more direct instrument of governmental decision-making.

But even today social media is being extended into the political process directly. If you look at Barack Obama’s presidential campaign social media tools were an essential factor in organizing his campaign workers: enthusiasm for a political candidate was transformed into political action directly through social media. Obama’s record online campaign donations were another example of how social media breaks through into the real space.

People are using social media tools to organize people rapidly in local areas as well: weblogs were a crucial factor in our local elections in 2006 and social media tools have helped to change the course of several local political debates.

Our town’s First Selectman, a mayor by most people’s understanding, is a blogger! Finally I think that we’re seeing more and more use of venues such as Facebook to make people aware of political causes and to be organized to take real-world action. Hundreds of thousands of people who are passionate about a cause can be organized in a matter of a few days. That’s highly scalable political activism that just wasn’t there a few years ago.

We need the tools of social media to help us form our decision making, but it’s up to us to take action based on those experiences.

I trust and expect that the power of social media to enable such transformation of discussions in to action will catch the world by surprise in the months and years ahead.

I doubt that the discussions in coffee houses and taverns in colonial American were taken very seriously by those who were not a part of them. But then people decided to act upon those discussions.

So it will be with social media. People have no idea yet as to just how powerful a tool that it will become.

The courage of convictions is all that’s required to make that clear to the world. This happens again and again already in ways large and small, but some day soon the world will be aware that they are a nation of publishers, united in their ability to communicate to the world and to influence one another as citizens of the same.

Sepp Hasslberger of Health Supreme / Hasslberger.com

1. Is this participation really democratic?

   If democracy means participation, then web 2.0 is really democratic.

   Actually it can be even considered more democratic than what we are used to calling our “democratic society“, where participation is not invited. We are supposed to vote once every four-five years, and let the politicians get on with leading us wherever they wish. Not much of the original idea of democracy left there.

2. Or is this a democracy paradox, where everyone can interact but the decision making places are all outside the net?

   You could call it a paradox. Everyone can interact on the web, but for now, the decisions are made in other places. Just as I said, we elect politicians and are expected to let them do the leading.

   It would be much better if there were some connection between what the people want and what the politicians are doing. I could imagine that the web might be used to discuss and decide on actual things in politics, and the politicians take the message that has been “filtered out” and act in accordance with it.

   But this is only a phase of transition. Sooner or later, the web will gain an important role in politics, even to the extent where we no longer need politicians.

   If we can discuss and decide, all we need to implement decisions are administrators - local, regional, national, international - administrators to carry out the will of the people.

3. The horizontal leveling of internet communications is really an instrument of democracy?

   It should be and it could be, but right now, I think it isn’t.

   How would it be possible to transform these emotional and communication-oriented extensions in real space connected with the physical world of true participation to decision-making?

   There are several efforts that attempt to bring electronic voting and discussions into the political reality, so far with very limited success.

   To bring true participatory decision making, first of all, we’ll have to learn to take our share of responsibility. When there are decisions to be made, and this will be practically constantly, we must be willing to take time out from other efforts to get into the issues that are of interest to us, and participate in the process of maturing a consensus.

   At the same time, we need to link these decisions into the actual administration of things.

   It appears a huge step to take from where we are now, but things are in motion.

Originally written and prepared by Robin Good for Master New Media and first published on October 10th 2008 as “Is Web 2.0 Really Democratic?“

Beyond file-sharing, peer-to-peer is an alternative way of looking at work, live and the way we make money. Although mainstream media coverage of P2P has mostly focused its spotlights on the on-going debate around file-sharing and pirated media (music, movies, games), the social, economic, and political consequences of peer-to-peer go well beyond that narrow focus.

Michel Bauwens - Photo credit: Robin Good

The success of Wikipedia is a perfect example of how peer-to-peer collaboration extends well beyond the walls of pirated media. Wikipedia demonstrates that as a mode of production, peer-to-peer can succeed and even operate with efficiencies that closed systems cannot compete with.

Furthermore, p2p as a governance and economic model holds promises and solutions to problems that other models (including democracy and capitalism) are incapable of dealing with. As an economic model it can create new incentives to work. Rather than money being the driving force to create, as with capitalism, “voluntary passionate production” takes precedence.

Perhaps an even better example of how peer-to-peer can fundamentally affect (for the better) the world in which we live is the potential it has to alter our monetary system. The growing success of microlending and microlending institutions like Prosper has already demonstrated that even an entrenched social system like our financial system can benefit from becoming more distributed.

In this exclusive video interview with MasterNewMedia, Michel Bauwens, founder of the Peer-to-Peer Foundation, discusses some of the greater social effects of peer-to-peer.

Here are all the details:

Peer to Peer: Why P2P Is Better Than Capitalism

I think if you want to know what is wrong with capitalism and how peer-to-peer is an improvement over it, you have to look at the history of motivation and cooperation. Pre-modern societies were based on coercion / force - a slave had to give everything and serf had to give half or more of what was produced.

The dream of capitalism said that instead of forcing you, why don’t we create mutual self interest, so we will just exchange things of equal value with each other. In a way that is great progress because we go from external negative motivation (fear) to external positive motivation (money).

The problem with that is that if you don’t have money - if you don’t have positive motivation on the outside, you don’t do it. Also the problem is if you have a system based on self interest then no one looks at the other consequences. No one looks at pollution. And no one wants to do anything that is not paid.

Furthermore if you look at the way innovation works in a company you want to innovate and improve because you don’t want to be buried under competition. If you don’t have competition because it’s a monopoly for example, then you don’t improve. Look at Microsoft’s Internet Explorer… nothing really moved for 5-7 years because Netscape was dead.

Now think about a peer production like Mozilla Firefox. These people want to innovate not to be better than the other guy, but because they just want to make the best possible browser. Firefox doesn’t have to protect its property rights; anyone can make a plug-in. So Firefox is innovating all the time. It is moving all the time.

The genius of peer-to-peer is that it filters out negative outside motivation / positive outside motivation and focuses on internal motivation - voluntary passionate production. Your individual interest in improvement corresponds with the values of everyone within that organization. And the whole project is available to all of humanity via the network.

• When a for-profit institution competes with a for-benefit institution, the for-benefit institution like the Mozilla Foundation can draw on a community so the for-profit companies lose a competitive advantage. I think in those ways peer production is an improvement over for-profit production models.
• Similarly, if you have two for-profit companies competing, it is the one that opens up and invites user participation that will do better than the one that doesn’t. That means that for-profit companies are adopting peer-to-peer practices. If you take any two communities where one is locked and isolate while the other says we can collaborate with companies and cooperate with others (individuals, corporations) the second will have an advantage. What that points to is that peer production and for-profit are not antagonistic, they are complimentary in many ways.

But I would still argue that peer production is post capitalist because it is not about commodities, wage relationships, or about producing for the marketplace with commodities and exchange value.

So in many ways if you do that, part of you is already outside of the market. You are learning to do things differently and not just out of pure self interest.

Peer To Peer: The Economic Viability of Peer Production

Yes, I just think it’s an interesting proposal to think about. And the way I explain it is the following.

Right now we’re split. We have two sides of our lives:

• We have the side who has to survive… that has to make money and we engage in the formal economy, we get paid, we get a salary. But we also often very much work in an alienated way. We don’t do what we like, we have a boss we don’t like. All kinds of elements which make this not the perfect solution for many people.
• And then we have a surplus. And that surplus of intellect, of computers, of access to the networks, makes that, when we do not have to work for a living, More and more of us are engaging in our passions. And we produce what I call peer production, governors, and property.

Now what we notice today, I think increasingly, is that actually the part of us, our surplus, is more productive than when we are in the system.

Now, that should tell the system something. So the system can start thinking. Well actually when people… let’s assume they’re unemployed… so between jobs you fall in a kind of intermediate period when you’re jobless what before you used to think you’re worthless, you have no value.

Today I will argue maybe is exactly in those moments you actually produce the most value for society.

• So the first thing to do is create a system that at least allows people to move more easily from the market to the non-market. It’s kind of life-long career planning which allows people to say I want to engage with my passion and I can do that for a certain time and then I go back to the market.
• And I think as we mature in this… as we strengthen peer-to-peer, we discover that actually more and more value is created in the informal economy.
• At that moment I think we can start arguing for basic income because then it is
  no longer welfare. I am not just giving you money to help you. I’m actually recognizing a society that by the mere fact that you’re a citizen engaging in networks and producing value in common, you’re actually giving society crucial value and therefore I give you back what you give.

I don’t think we’re there yet. I think that maturation of peer production might actually lead to the situation where I don’t know, ten, twenty, thirty years from now, this becomes a really debatable issue.

Peer To Peer: The Potential For P2P To Unite The World

It does happen very rarely. Because most people today have an inner sense that openness is better than enclosure. You know when they hear about free software and open-source development actually most people recognize that it’s a good way of doing things. That if you want to cooperate you have to be open with each other.

So I think that actually peer-to-peer to has a potential unite many people that are politically opposed to each other because it has different values embedded. It has a freedom which liberals like and libertarians like. It has the equality aspect that people on the left like. It has a relation aspect that conservative people like, you know, being embedded in a community.

So what we have to do is look at the common interest of a group of people in advancing concretely the space for this to emerge. And not to overly politicize it and to a create kind of almost artificial oppositions.

Peer To Peer: How Peer Governance And Democracy Differ

I think there is a difference between peer governance and democracy, direct or indirect. I’ll try to explain it in the following way:

Think about the market. Think about hierarchy and think about democracy. Those are simply three different ways to allocate resources.

• The market says it’s all about the price. The effort will go to the most valuable thing to do.
• Hierarchy says we’re clever, because we know everything so we will organize production for you.
• And democracy says we have different groups with different interests so we’ll negotiate about who gets what.

Peer governance functions in the immaterial environment of intellectual cooperation over the networks. And you are basically self-aggregating your resources. So as long as you’re self-aggregating your resources, you don’t need any other way to aggregate your resources. You don’t need a market, you don’t need a hierarchy and you don’t need democracy. And the type of relations you have is I voluntary contributed to other projects, so do you. And you don’t pay me so why should I listen to you. So you need consensus. You need expertise. You need engagement and somehow and we see that it works that people can actually have very complex projects that are organized through peer governance. This is one side of the equation.

The other side of the equation is that in order to cooperate you have a number of fixed cost you need infrastructure of cooperation. You need servers. These servers are a renewable resource so you need a cost-recovery mechanism. So there you are in different domain. You actually need to allocate and protect resources. So what happens in peer production is in that environment people create nonprofits… the Mozilla Foundation, the Apache Foundation, Wikimedia Foundation. And they will manage the infrastructure of cooperation on behalf of the community. But because they have scarce resources, you need the democratic structure.

And so I would say overall a society is dealing not just with immaterial resources, but mostly with scarce material resources… with hunger, food, physical things. We still need democracy.

But to the degree that you did with intellectual cooperation, culture and knowledge, and open design, you are in peer governance. So what I think is happening is that… let’s say that this is the volume of democracy we have in society. This is the volume of peer governance. It is that the space of peer governance will grow but we’ll not totally replace the sphere of democracy. I think it’s impossible as long as we live in a material world.

Peer To Peer: Michel Bauwens’ Vision For the World

My dream is a world where more and more people can follow their passion… find meaning in their life… express themselves. And that more and more value is created that way.

In the current world we think that nature is infinite, and we think that we have to make things (intellectual, spiritual, cultural things) scarce artificially. My dream is that we turn that around. That we recognize that sharing is infinite and that nature is not infinite. And therefore change the way our civilization, our society runs. Based on that recognition.

I think once you start working peer-to-peer in your field, that you’re following your life’s dreams that you’re passionate about, then you don’t want to go back.

I think more and more people should have a chance than just a minority of people.

Peer To Peer: Why People Are Afraid Of P2P

I think it is the issue of expertise. The fear of dumbing down. The fear that if you broaden participation the people who know more will be lost in the masses. And I think the more hierarchical a society is, the more power experts have, and the more fear they have of losing it.

I think in some countries for example like in France they get more easily angry than in others. So, there’s this fear that if you open up that the people who know less will take power. And the quality of society will go down. And it’s a fear that I recognize.

I think peer-to-peer runs a danger in some circumstances of having that effect. I don’t think it’s inherent to peer-to-peer. I think it’s bad design, bad governance. That leads to those kind of processes. And now we have value-conscious design, a value-sensitive design that designs for diversity, for autonomy, for selection of excellence. And are the best processes to do that better than even other forms of social organization.

I think this fear is the same fear of democracy. When people started arguing that everybody had the right to vote. There was a very similar fear that democracy would bring the rule of the mob. Now we have had two-hundred years of democracy and democracy is far from perfect. But who wants to go back to an authoritarian state? Not many people want to go back.

It is the same thing with peer-to-peer. Once it’s there… once you’re used to it, when you have problems, you try to solve it in a peer-to-peer way. We don’t want to go back to the old systems.

Peer To Peer: How P2P Can Change Our Monetary System

I define peer-to-peer as a direct social production value by civil society.

And when you look at money, money is created by banks through their loans and it’s regulated by the central banks. One of the things that we also discovered in peer-to-peer is the importance of invisible architectures. The kind of protocol, the design rules that favours some kind of behavior and make other kinds of behavior difficult.

So I think that what this shows us is that these protocols of money today, interest-based money, is a protocol which drives infinite growth. Infinite growth in a finite system. So I think that this is not a good thing this kinda monetary system which is based on fighting for scarce resources. And so the scarcity for the people who need it. And then you have ninety-eight percent of the money which is floating around speculatively and creating one bubble after another. I don’t think this is a very good system.

Now how would a system like this change? Well of course the people who would profit from it are not gonna change it. So what if we create an open money system that we can manage ourselves. That we can choose a protocol from. And that virtual and physical communities can start using from the bottom up. I would say that’s one of the particular changes that could happen through peer-to-peer.

The other one is the following: to have peer-to-peer, you have access to your own resources. So today we have:

• Our brains
• A community of surplus
• Computers
• Access to the networks

Now, when machines start becoming miniaturized, we will have desktop manufacturing, personal fabricators, flexible manufacturing, multi-purpose machinery. All these trends point to capital becoming cheaper and more distributed.

When financing becomes more distributed, which is the point of social lending (like Prosper - the American system or Zopa - the English system). That means that people can get money from each other.

Then we have:

• Computers are distributed
• Machines are getting distributed
• Money is getting more distributed

What it does is it augments the peer-to-peer in society. So that peer-to-peer production can move from pure knowledge production to open design for machinery, to actually making things in a more peer-to-peer way. And finding the capital to do it as well.

All these are not changes that are happening over night. But I think the direction of change is in that direction. So in the next ten, twenty, thirty years, we’ll see more of these different steps taken up by different people and creating the basis for another type of society which I call the peer-to-peer society.

Peer To Peer And Alternative Currencies: Michel Bauwens’ View

Open money for me is a particular type of alternative currency which has the capacity to follow different rules.

The important thing is not to have an alternative currency which does the same thing as the old. The important thing is to have new rules for that currency. As long as they are local currencies, they can’t scale. So what I am thinking of are open money systems which are virtual (through the internet) and can therefore scale globally and be an interchange between different communities.

Peer To Peer: How P2P Can Continue to Grow

I think that the most important thing for peer-to-peer to grow is through example. And that is really what the Peer-to-Peer Foundation wants to do. We want to be an inter-networking platform, where people in the open and free, participatory, and community oriented movements (in whatever field they are) can publicize their efforts, can see who else is doing something similar and can share experiences.

And when people see that peer-to-peer ways of doing things are more efficient… are more pleasant… are more democratic, they will find more and more in common with it. So I think that we are at the very beginning of that revolution where people are beginning to see that.

Peer To Peer: The Relationship Between The People and The Technology

The engineers who created the internet did it for scientific research and for peer review and exchanging information amongst peers. And gradually as the internet became more and more popular then there were more and more centralized elements within it. Now this is true, and the Web, for example, is a client-server system. But I think the important thing is not to get blinded by technology.

It’s really about the people. Can you as individuals produce information, share it, distribute it? And can I as a user find it, take it, and use it? As long as those things are guaranteed we have peer-to-peer human relationships.

And of course we have to be careful about the technology. We have to look at it, we have to see who is in charge… who owns it, what the rules are, and we have to be careful about it. But we shouldn’t be blinded by the technology.

It’s really about enabling and empowering human participation. That’s the key. And sometimes what peer-to-peer does is in a pure way it might make systems less efficient. Take Napster, Napster was more efficient because it had a centralized database. But that made it vulnerable. So politically the file-sharing community was obliged to go more purely peer-to-peer not because it was technically superior but because they wanted a system that couldn’t be broken. That is a political decision.

You have to make a balance between going in a more pure peer-to-peer way and maybe having more redundancy, or going toward more efficiency with more centralized elements. But then they are more vulnerable to ownership and control. So this is a technical decision not a philosophical decision. You have to see what is happening concretely in order to make those decisions.

In general we have to have a preference for distributed systems because that is what allows people to be in charge of their own productive resources.

Originally shot and recorded by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and first published on October 8th 2008 as “Peer To Peer: Social, Political, and Economic Issues In A P2P World - A Video Interview with Michel Bauwens“.

About Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens (1958) is a Belgian integral philosopher and Peer-to-Peer theorist. He has worked as an internet consultant, information analyst for the United States Information Agency, information manager for British Petroleum (where he created one of the first virtual information centers), and is former editor-in-chief of the first European digital convergence magazine, the Dutch language Wave. With Frank Theys, he is the co-creator of a 3 hour documentary TechnoCalyps, an examination of the ‘metaphysics of technology’. He taught and edited two French language anthologies on the Anthropology of Digital Society.

Although a student of Ken Wilber’s integral theory for many years, he has recently become critical of aspects of the Wilber-Beck movement, and is a powerful voice for a non-authoritarian peer-to-peer based integral society.

Michel is the author of a number of on-line essays, including a seminal thesis Peer to Peer and Human Evolution, and is editor of P2P News

He now lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he created the Foundation for P2P Alternatives and maintains a blog.

He has taught courses on the anthropology of digital society to postgraduate students at ICHEC/St. Louis in Brussels, Belgium and related courses at Payap University and Chiang Mai University in Thailand.

Information overload: are you affected by it? How can you better manage it? Are big companies giving us more and better information? How can you determine which information is worthwhile looking at? How to you decrease the noise created by the huge volume of info coming at you everyday?

Photo credit: Mikkel

Information overload is a two-sided problem:

1. The sender does not communicate her message efficiently
2. The receiver is unable to filter the information and evaluate which is the one she really needs

In this brilliant paper Mikkel explains very clearly what information overload is and how it is silently affecting our life.

It does not matter where you were born, which type of religion you belong to or the color of your skin. Mikkel suggests that individuals are just information-driven, they don’t belong to any sociological category when dealing with communication. They should be treated and communicated to only by being highly aware of what specific information they are are looking for.

Here all the details:

Information Overload

In our everyday life we are bombarded with information: advertisements in the mail box, fast paced TV, interviews never lasting more than three minutes, signs and symbols everywhere we go, internet pages, chat sessions, offers to buy this or to do that, and lots of other stuff.

We are overloaded with information: the more input, the more we shut off and become cynical. But ad-people, designers and producers respond by feeding us MORE information!

The reason is that we / they rest in a 300 year old mindset, established and maintained by newspapers: that as much information as possible should be conveyed in as little space as possible. The Latin word omnibus means “everything for everybody” and that old newspaper doctrine shows as a desire to impress through a diversity of features mixed in a big bowl of confusion.

The intention is to show the most products and information, so that each one has a ”scatter-gun”-ish opportunity to reach a target audience: ”Look how exciting I am, here you won’t be bored”. The focusing on features results in everything being emphasized - and therefore that nothing really is!

I call it featureism.

• Featureism is a statement of what the transmitter wants to sell. It’s not a guide for the recipient to find what she wants.
• Featureism is not information. It’s desperation.
• Featureism is to go against our nature. It is to go against the way humans naturally interprets our surroundings.
• Featureism is bad communication and the result is information overload.

But there is another way…

Focused Information

All communication is basically about saying the right thing to the right one at the right time in the right way. The easiest thing in this equation is the external part, finding the target audience, while the hard thing is to handle the internal part: the transmitter:

• ”me”
• ”myself”
• ”I”
• ”we”
• ”us”

The hard part is to shut up. The result, however, is transmitter focus, instead of recipient focus, the result is lost attention and lost market shares.

I know how hard it is, as a transmitter, to focus on the recipient and how easy it is to think of oneself. Besides philosophizing on media, communication and technology, I also (once in a while) design websites. I know the feeling of wanting to sell websites but ALSO sell my ideas (you’re reading some of them now) - because I love both so much and would hate to prioritize between them.

My brain knows that it’s best to split the two areas, but my heart would rather not let go - and the result is that I send mixed signals of who I am and what I do. My customers also know how hard it is to limit oneself - when I create their sites, the hard part isn’t to convince them to try a radical design-idea of mine, but rather to convince them to limit themselves in terms of content. They respond in a slightly desperate tone: ”…but Mikkel, I also do this and that - those things must be included!”

But the customer is NOT always right - and the brochures and websites of even big and famous companies cannot be used as an ideal of well designed communication - to the contrary! The bigger the company is, the worse it’s communication usually is - simply because it isn’t capable of administering and conveying all the information.

Information Tunnels

Focused information often use what I call information tunnels. Communication is focused when it’s precisely adjusted to a certain group of recipients. When a transmitter adjusts a certain message to several groups of recipients, and allow the individual recipient to choose which group she belongs to, the transmitter has created an information tunnel.

Using information tunnels effectively, means that one can divide all recipients in groups - but these doesn’t have to be socio- or demographically based. I believe that dividing people by age or income, or voting pattern, is less important. It’s why they interact with you, their intention, that counts!

To illustrate: all recipients of this very article can be divided into three categories:

1. Those that has found it by curiosity - they are interested in an easy-understandable and entertaining communication.
2. Those that were looking for information on marketing - they want a practical guideline in using the theories.
3. And those recipients that are media- and communication theorists - they desire a scientifically valid communication.

In this case, the recipient’s age or daily-life is of no or little importance, only their intention for reading this: whether they are belonging to 1, 2 or 3.

My claim is that whatever we do, we are not sociologically founded, we are intentionally founded. Key to reaching a recipient is not knowing her age, but what she wants to do. As you see, this article is not an example of information tunnels or focused information (rather it is one of featureism) but this article would have been so, if I had made three of them, each catering to the desires of each of the recipient groups.

For instance, take this example of how to effectively create an information tunnel: On the front page of “www.tag-eksperten.dk” there’s a large picture of a craftsman on a roof, and the explicit text:

”we lay new tile roofs for home owners on Sealand) - specific offer, thorough consultation, a new roof in a league of it’s own, delivered in only four weeks”.

In this way the company’s business, mission, geographic reach and terms of trade are all precisely defined in words and pictures.

At the bottom there are three boxes which might seem like features, but in reality are information tunnels:

• ”Choose tiles”
• ”Calculate price of a new roof”
• ”8 tips on roof renovating”

Thus exists an entrance for those most interested in the looks of their new roof, one for those worried about the price, and one for those with a do-it-yourself attitude. On the other hand, it must be said that the language is the same throughout the website, so in this way it doesn’t abide the principle of information tunnels.

An accepted idea in business communication is integrated communication:

• That all parts of a company ”speaks the same language”
• That communication is stream-lined

Besides this principle being de facto impossible - maybe even undesirable - to realize, it doesn’t influence focused information: integrated communication deals with the company’s communication with, and in relation to, it’s surroundings: what’s to be said. Focused information deals with how it’s to be said.

Focused information is therefore not to change the message, but to vary the delivery and expression, depending on whom the recipient is.

The Trend In Society

Another way to view information overload, is as trend in society. The problem today isn’t obtaining information - the problem is to organize it.

• The history of media started with the invention of writing, which made it possible to convey knowledge across time and space.

• The printing press, with its efficiency and cheapness, made the written knowledge accessible to many.
• The telegraph contributed with a previously impossible speed, resulting in an even greater availability of information.
• The original internet was merely a new form, a technological reincarnation, of the principle.
• Today’s internet, by some called Web 2.0, gives an even greater amount of information, through easy tools for creating, publishing and sharing - this article is an example.

The history of media is thus a single continuous expansion of access to information, now available in enormous quantities - the key word here is quantity. The new is the opposing movement that is awakening: de-selecting quantity and passive reception, to the advantage of quality and active selection. We see it in avoidance of advertisements, traditional media loses readers/viewers, growing numbers even stop watching TV, internet technologies allows customized information channels, etc.

The key word here is quality. For on the one hand, technology increased the availability, but at the same time it has lowered the ”cost of access / entry” and increased individuality. ”Ordinary people” have regained control, in a form of technological democratization. The individual can avoid information overload and increase the amount of relevance in her life.

The New Way Of Living

In everyday life, this reaction to information overload, is seen in a general return to origins, to a lower pace. It shows in an mild increasing interest in spartan ways of living, nudism, and a general “turning inwards”, among other things towards philosophy, religion and emotional health.

The opposite of information overload - silence, emptiness and thoughtfulness - is trendy already: monasteries experience great interest, pilgrimages have returned. The most successful publications are niche-oriented and deals with a narrow subject, or they are dealing with any kind of emotional issue. A symbol of this movement could be Eckhart Tolle: a secretive author that sells millions of books about spirituality.

In the last 20 years, the most talked about, has been that which didn’t strive for being talked about:

• The café that is only discovered though word of mouth
• A membership only obtained through fulfilling secret criteria
• a musician that appears incognito
• A product in limited editions, etc.

All this is a a different kind of quality.

Another result of information overload, is the way we relate to each other. Because a greater part of our