Curious, is it not, that Trebor writes online, but with no way to comment on his piece? A distinctly Web 1.0ish Web Journal Glad you provided an opportunity here to comment. There is some truth to what he says but it is disingenuous of him to relate it to the collaborative aspects of the emerging social web in a politically-motivated way. The main effects he is pointing out emerge really from the Big Switch effects chronicled by Nicholas Carr, and from the Long Tail effects, which serve to bring free agents out from abject penury to sustainable poverty while making niche aggregators like Netflix very rich. Kevin Kelly gets at this in A 1000 true fans. Spinning these two effects of the changing costs of SaaS computing and information transparency as some sort of politically-created, inequity-fostering conspiracy is just plain silly. It’s just creative-destructive economics grinding on. The effects are not deeply related to the collaboration aspects of Web 2.0, and nobody said collaboration was supposed to foster equality anyway. And while on that, Trebor’s random rant about Web 2.0 naming is just tired — the semantics
of Web 2.0 are more subtle and interesting than that. In summary, the piece displays the most common failing of critics of Web 2.0 and social computing: a lack of imagination.

Rgds,

Venkat

I see naysaying from many folks who can’t release themselves from a traditional top down way of conducting business.

They see it as black or white. Top down….or a utopian social collaboration.

He states, “his sole mission is a socially friction–free update of the timeworn capitalist power dynamics”.

Throughout your book you guys state how tough a lot of these iniatives are to achieve, and at no point state it will friction-free. The friction can generate energy.

Just because corporations participate in collaboration doesn’t put them in control nor does it give all the control to the masses, it is a mutual relationship. The relationship is not necessarily forced from either side…there are organic elements that contribute to the process.

There is an aspect of wikinomics that does, in truth, allow “fewer and fewer to get richer and richer by using many earning less and less.”

However, there’s also an (what I believe far important) aspect that allows more and more people to get enrich themselves in a world of mass collaboration – in ways that were never before possible.

It’s really quite hard to enable the second without having a bit of the first… all part of the creative destruction process.

Well put! I find the notion that “the relationship will always be one of forced cooperation” particularly peculiar…

Actually I think there is a democratization of value creation occurring. Below are some editors cuts (first time publisher here) that speak to the issue. They were written a couple of years ago and hold up pretty well:

Due to deep changes in technology, demographics, business, the economy and the world, we are entering a new age where people participate in the economy like never before. This new participation has reached a tipping point where new forms of peer collaboration and production (or peer production for short) change how goods and services are invented, produced, marketed, and distributed on a global basis. This change presents far-reaching opportunities for every company and, most of all, for you.

In the past, people played limited economic roles. They were passive consumers of mass-produced products marketed through mass-communication mediums. As employees, they worked within organizational silos where the boss told them what to do. Their elected representatives patronized them with thinly veiled contempt for citizen participation in decision-making. Too many people were bypassed by circulation of knowledge, power and capital, and thus participated at the economy’s margins.

Today, the tables are turning. The growing accessibility of the tools required to collaborate, create value and compete enable people to participate in innovation and wealth creation within every sector of the economy. New low-cost business infrastructures (from free Internet telephony to global outsourcing platforms) allow thousands upon thousands of small producers to create products, access markets, and delight customers in ways that only large corporations could manage in the past. Credentialed knowledge producers share the stage with “amateur” creators that are disrupting every activity they touch. Individuals now share knowledge, computing power, bandwidth and other resources to create a wide array of goods and services that make everybody more productive.

These changes, among others, are ushering us toward a world where knowledge, power and productive capability will be more dispersed than at any time in our history—a world where value creation will be fast, fluid and persistently disruptive; a world where only the connected will survive. A power shift is underway and a tough new business rule is emerging: collaborate or perish. Those who fail to grasp this will find themselves ever more isolated—cut off from the networks that are sharing, adapting, and updating knowledge to create value.

This might sound like hyperbole, but it’s not. Consider some new ways you can now participate in the global body economiqé.

Rather than just reading a book you can write one. Just log on to Wikipedia—a collaboratively created encyclopedia, owned by no one and authored by tens of thousands of people. With two full time employees, it is 13 times bigger than Encyclopedia Britannica and roughly the same in accuracy. It runs on a Wiki — software that enables users to edit the content of Web pages. Despite the risks inherent in an open encyclopedia in which everyone can add their views, Wikipedia continues to grow rapidly in scope, quality, and traffic. The English-language version has more than a million entries and there are 92 sister-sites in languages ranging from Polish and Japanese to Hebrew and Catalan.

If you’re a retired, unemployed or aspiring chemist, Procter and Gamble needs your help. The pace of innovation has doubled in its industry in the past five years alone and now its army of 7,500 researchers is no longer enough to sustain its lead. Rather than hire more researchers, CEO A.G. Lafley instructed business unit leaders to source 50% of their new product and service ideas from outside the company. Now you can work for P&G without being on their payroll. Just register on the InnoCentive network where you and 85,000 other scientists around the world help solve tough R&D problems for a cash reward. InnoCentive is only one of many revolutionary marketplaces matching scientists to R&D challenges presented by companies in search of innovation. P&G and thousands of other companies look to these marketplaces for ideas, inventions, and uniquely qualified minds.

Tired of your day job? Go ahead, quit. Almost a million other people have done so and now make their living selling new and used goods through eBay. In the past they might have been one of 50 people selling to a market of a few hundred tourists who show up at a Sunday parking lot flea market. Today 35 million auctions engage more than 100 million participants in a global, consumer-to consumer market. Another 15,000 software developers, meanwhile, turn a profit by building third-party applications for the eBay platform that help small retailers streamline their eBay businesses. CEO Meg Whitman calls the community of developers a key partner in the business.

Rather than consume the TV news, you can now create it, along with thousands of independent citizen journalists that are turning the profession upside down. Tired of the familiar old faces and blather on network news? Turn off your TV, pick up a video camera some cheap editing software, and create a news feature for CurrentTV, a new national cable and satellite network created almost entirely by amateur contributors. Though the contributors are unpaid volunteers, the content is surprisingly good. CurrentTV provides online tutorials for camera operation and storytelling techniques and their guidelines for creating stories help get participants started. Viewers vote on which stories go to air, so only the most engaging material makes prime time.

If you’re a young person in India, China, Brazil or any one of a number of emerging Eastern European countries, chances are you can do what your parents only dreamed of by joining the global economy on an equal footing. Global production networks, increasing literacy and numeracy, information technologies, and falling trade barriers are making the world smaller, flatter, and open.

You might be in a call center in Bangalore who takes food orders for a drive-in restaurant in Los Angeles. You may be a programmer in Sao Paolo or Bucharest, who, like tens of thousands of other software developers around the world, participates in the multi-billion dollar ecosystem that co-creates the open-source operating system called Linux. Or you could find yourself working in the new Hon Hai city in the Schenzen province of China., where a decade ago farmers tilled the land with oxen. Today 180 thousand people work, live, learn and play in a massive high tech campus – designing and building consumer electronics for teenagers around the globe. Like an estimated one billion individuals in formerly peripheral economic backwaters, you can plug-and-play in the global economy and make economic history in the process.

If you’re an aspiring student in Mumbai and you’ve always dreamed of going to MIT, you can now access the university’s entire curriculum online without paying a penny in tuition fees. Just log on to ocw.mit.edu and you’ll read “Welcome to MIT’s OpenCourseWare: a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world. OCW supports MIT’s mission to advance knowledge and education, and serve the world in the 21st century.” You can engage with the content and faculty of one of the world’s leading universities studying everything from Aeronautics to Zoology. Download the readings and assignments for courses. Share your experiences in one of the community forums. Become part of MIT, participating in lifelong learning for the global knowledge economy.

Did you ever imagine you could help predict global climate change, analyze genetic diseases, and find new planets and stars? Now you can — in your sleep. When not in use, donate your personal computer’s spare processor cycles to a giant virtual computer. Researchers at Olson Laboratory use a massive supercomputer to evaluate candidates for drugs that might one day cure AIDS. FightAIDS@home is part of the World Community Grid, a global network of millions of individual computers linked via the Internet to form one of the world’s most powerful computing platforms. Each computer performs a small part of an immensely computation-intensive task and it’s all possible because of people’s willingness to share. Soon, networked infrastructures like these will connect all of the world’s living and inanimate objects, powering applications that we can scarcely imagine.

If you’re buried in some silo of a large company, chances are growing for you to collaborate with others across the organization in doing something truly significant for the whole firm. That’s what Gill Denis did at retailer Best Buy. The store manager believed his peers across the company probably understood Best Buy’s customers in ways head office didn’t. He facilitated a meeting of some other store managers that led to a broader collaborative process that began generating some great insights. When CEO Brad Anderson got wind of the process he gave it his endorsement as a central element in his “customer centricity” strategy. Today through wikis, blogs and other tools, including meetings, all sorts of unorthodox collaboration takes place across the company that cuts across the formal hierarchy. A culture emerges where employees focus on customers, not internal status.

Rather than just reading a newspaper you can create one, by setting up a blog (Weblog). Share your news, information or views with the tens of millions of people who go to a self-organized network of over a 30 million personal commentary sites. Some of the largest blogs receive a quarter-of-a-million daily visitors, rivaling some daily newspapers. You’ll have to compete for attention though—a new blog post appears every second of every day and the blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 months. Now audioblogs, podcasts, and mobile photo blogs are adding to a dynamic, up-to-the-minute stream of person-to-person news and information delivered free over the Web. Immediately after the July 7, 2005 terrorist bombings of the London Underground, the best source for information (within minutes) was Wikipedia, and the best source for photos was the photo-sharing community Flickr. Citizen journalism at work.

Perhaps you’d like to participate more fully in the community where you live – saving lives or preventing crime. During the Katrina Hurricane the authorities responded ineptly, so thousands of people took things into their own hands by entering problem situations onto a Google map of New Orleans. The result was a dynamic online repository of critical information, updated in real time, including the sites where alleged guns shots were fired and the locations of people in need of help. Similarly, Web developer Adrian Holovaty took Chicago crime stats and overlaid them on Google’s maps. The result was a unique new public service where you type in an address and up pops a map detailing the latest reported crimes in the area.

Alternatively, specify a crime, such as assault or automated-teller-machine theft, and view a map where those crimes recently occurred.

For incumbents in every industry, this new cornucopia of participation is both exhilarating and alarming. Many 800-pound gorillas of the industrial economy remain shackled by command-and-control legacies, despite their best efforts to change. They have spent the last three decades rebuilding their operations to compete in a hyper-competitive economy—ripping costs out of their businesses at every opportunity; trying to become more “customer-friendly”; building global production networks; and scattering their bricks-and-mortar R&D organizations around the world.

Now they are learning this was only the beginning; that the real revolution is just starting. The competition is no longer their arch-industry rivals; it may be us—the uber-connected, amorphous mass of self-organized individuals that are gripping our economic needs firmly in one hand, and our economic destinies in the other.

Scholz makes the valuable observation that collaborative technologies started with, and have been developing since, the beginnings of the Internet. His characterization of Web 2.0 as a newfound enthusiasm for such technologies, particularly amongst the business community, has some truth to it. Of course this enthusiasm has been accompanied by (and was likely caused in part by the successes of) increased development and use of collaborative technologies.

But enthusiasm for collaborative technology has by no means spread to all businesses. Nor are those that are enthusiastic about it necessarily at all capable of effectively using it. In fact, many of the successful uses of collaborative technology have been pioneered by startups without a proven revenue model. Big, old-school corporations have been buying up these startups and trying (often unsuccessfully) to use collaborative technology on their own, often less out of enthusiasm than the feeling of necessity. Necessity because even if your competitors aren’t using it, chances are that the “social web” is using it to provide, for free to anyone, the same services you make your money selling.

Scholz’s assertion that “beneath all the flirtation [with collaboration], capitalism needs to stay in control,” does seem informed by a poorly-articulated distaste for capitalism. However, I think it quite correctly identifies the major source of resistance to the trend towards greater collaboration: big, old-school corporations. My inability to watch Lost episodes online legally (even though I am still exposed to ads when I watch them illegally), the continued battle over net neutrality (that these companies seem to be purposefully trying to shut out of the public’s eye), and obsessions with keeping information proprietary by suing over every copyright infringement are examples of this resistance. These companies are resisting the move to a more collaborative economy, because it means they have to undergo a major transformation, one that might leave some of them worse-off than before.

What Scholz fails to realize is that companies are not homogenous. Some companies have embraced and are leading the charge towards greater collaboration. These companies are not a threat to the “social web”. True, YouTube or Facebook could have been developed as not-for-profit, Wikipedia-esque websites. But do they really behave any differently? Sure they have advertising, instead of donations. But as Facebook’s Beacon disaster shows, the community still has a lot of say as to what flies and what doesn’t. If Facebook management abuses their position, users will go elsewhere, perhaps to some equivalent, community-led service. Collaborative companies are partners in the wider community. They provide us with services, and if they do a poor job, we get those services from somewhere else. Those services are becoming important tools in the further development of the “social web”. I have worked with many activist groups on campus, and their communication and promotion relies heavily on Facebook and YouTube.

So, to my way of thinking, Scholz and his fellow “social web” advocates should find allies in collaborative companies. They are both members of, and accountable to, a wide and growing community of collaborators. Their survival will depend on evolving for the benefit of that community, and therefore for the benefit of each other. On the other hand, both groups should ally against the resistance of big, old-school corporations that would prefer increased digital propriety to greater collaboration.