Because of this when I speak about prosumerism, I like to start by looking at some questions around a very special Dilbert cartoon. Dilbert cartoons, as most people know, poke fun at society and particularly workplace culture, usually highlighting some absurdity that people can relate to. But in this case what I’m saying is that, for perhaps the first time in history, we can argue that companies need to start acting more like Dilbert cartoons, rather than less.

The reason I can say this (and long time wikinomics readers certainly already know this) is because last year, Scott Adams made a major change to the Dilbert.com site – they turned it into a Dilbert Mash up platform. Every day when Scott publishes his new cartoon, an alternate version goes up. In this alternate version,  the images are present in each of the three boxes, but the text in only the first two. Anyone could then login and add their own punchline to the cartoon (it’s since evolved to include Group mash ups and other things I’ll talk about later).To tie it back to the opening lingo, the site is now a prosumer platform.

I was participating in this quite a bit last year, so effectively Scott Adams and I were co-creating cartoons, such as this one:

Please, hold the applause… and the laughter is becoming overwhelming .

Back to the story. So this looks like a cute, fun little example – what could the possible business implications be? Well, let’s start by looking at the perspective of Scott Adams and United Media – why would he/they do this? And would you do the same thing in their place? Would your company – and how would the decision get made?

Read the rest of this post here.

For those of you that might not be up-to-date on your Miocene knowledge, Aquitanian is the first age of the Miocene Epoch, which dates back something like 23 million years ago. If you think I wouldn’t have known that without wikipedia, you would be correct.

As always, you can compare this to the original at www.dilbert.com… and see the rest of my Dilbert Mashups here. They’re positively Messinian!

To understand the wikinomics connection here, you may have to read what wikipedia has to say about termites. Notably:

The termites are a group of social insects usually classified at the taxonomic rank of order Isoptera (but see also taxonomy below). As truly social animals, they are termed eusocial along with the ants and some bees and wasps which are all placed in the separate order Hymenoptera. Termites mostly feed on dead plant material, generally in the form of wood, leaf litter, soil, or animal dung…

As eusocial insects, termites live in colonies that, at maturity, number from several hundred to several million individuals. They are a prime example of decentralised, self-organised systems using swarm intelligence and use this cooperation to exploit food sources and environments that could not be available to any single insect acting alone.

As always, you can check out the original at www.dilbert.com, and see all my other mashups here.

As I noted a little while back, the majority of my Dilbert mash ups are now being posted on a different site – you can check them all out here. However, if there’s a direct application to the principles of wikinomics they’ll be posted here, and there’s something about jury duty that speaks to either the wisdom or madness of crowds (depending on your perspective), so this seems to fit quite well with the ‘mass collaboration’ theme. It’s also interesting to note that we recently found out that the Dilbert mash ups are one of the prime conduits to the wikinomics blog for our Google reader subscribers – hopefully this will continue, and those that don’t like them can just look past them!

As always, you can check out the original at www.dilbert.com.

Regular readers of the blog may notice something different about today’s Dilbert mashup: such as the lack of a visible comic, or “mashup” if you will. The reason for this ties back to some fellow named “Rob”, who clearly has no sense of humour and spoiled the fun for the rest of us made an interesting comment on the July 18th mashup. In short, he found the Dilbert mashup to be a distraction not worthy of his attention, and indicated he would likely unsubscribe from the wikinomics blog, even though he really likes the rest of it, if my Dilberts continued messing up his techo-babble /noise. I’m also fairly sure he didn’t want my autograph.

So… we had a quick little review of the whole Dilbert mashup thing, in order to see whether this “Rob” fellow might be onto something. Thinking back, the initial idea behind the mash ups was that the new Dilbert site was an excellent example of the power of wikinomics in action, and what better way to promote such innovations than to participate in them ourselves? And since we have our own blog, wouldn’t it be cool if we could tie each mash up back to the principles of wikinomics in some way, and share these humerous anecdotes with our readers?

Well I sure thought it would be cool – and I think I’ve managed to make a direct connection a few times (such as July 7th, June 27th, June 25th, June 24th, June 20th, June 16th, a real doozy on June 13th, June 11th, June 9th, June 6th, June 5th, a humdinger on May 30th, May 27th, May 26th, May 22nd, May 20th, May 17th, May 16th, an “I almost wet my pants” on May 13th, May 10th, and May 8th/9th. For example).

However, scattered in between these are a few where the connection to wikinomics ranges from “less obvious” to “non-existent”, particularly when unspeakable violence involving coffee cups is prominently involved in the initial storyline. These posts may very well lead certain readers to question why exactly they are on the wikinomics site / in their reader – fair enough. However, without them we lose the regular publishing cycle to draw in the readers who, unlike “Rob”, actually like to see them daily, even in the cases where the wikinomics connections are weak. Such as my Mom and I.

So what to do when faced with such a dilemma? Simply embrace some of the principles of wikinomics, such as openness and collaboration, and launch Denis’ Dilbert Mash Ups on the blogger.com platform. Whenever I do a Dilbert mash up it will be published there, and on certain occasions, if the wikinomics connection is strong enough, we may also point to them here. That should make everyone happy, non?

As always, you’re invited to throw your hat into the ring and make your own at dilbert.com.

Thanks to Nicholas for this post – it’s refreshing to be called an exception in a good way – and to Luke for commenting on the post and directing people to the site. There is a 96.3% chance your life will improve if you follow their lead and send readers my way (you mean you don’t remember my first mash up?)

As always, you can check out the original (and all the other mash ups) at www.dilbert.com. Click on the Dilbert tag below to see all 52 of my mash ups (and counting…).

You can check out the original, and all the other mash ups, at www.dilbert.com.

As always, you can check out the original (and all the other mash ups) at www.dilbert.com. To celebrate my 50th mash up on the Dilbert platform, I thought that it was about time that I started branching out into a new genre – action films. The graphic below is not for the faint of heart, but it was recently revealed that Hellboy overpowered Hancock in the US, so somebody had to take a stand north of the border…

As always, you can check out the original (and all the other mash ups) at www.dilbert.com. If these themes keep up I’m going to have to add “random violence” to the tag cloud.

As always, check out www.dilbert.com for the original and all the other mash ups – now on to my comment on voting.

I have a group of people that I know who regular read my Dilbert cartoons, and they are extremely blunt in their assessments – whether they’re great, terrible, or somewhere in between. Interestingly enough, whenever they say that I’ve done a “good or better” job lately, I tend to find I have a relatively large number of ratings on the Dilbert site – but the ratings tend to be quite low. One possibility is that everyone I know has equally bad senses of humor, but I’m going to ignore that for now to look at what could be a fundamental flaw in the voting system.

There are no financial incentives for doing a Dilbert Mash up, just like there aren’t financial incentives to participate in many other collaborative platforms (like Wikipedia, etc.). In turn, those of us crazy enough to participate regularly in such things are likely, whether we admit it or not, to be interested in building a “reputation”. In the Dilbert mash up case, such reputations come through the voting mechanism – do people find you funnier than others or not?

Now unless it’s changed recently, the only way to vote on the comics is to be a registered user on the site. I would think the only people interested in registering are the people that want to do the mash ups. In turn, if they are interested in relative reputations, they’re incentive is to vote low scores for everyone else – particularly anything that looks half decent. It would be like a class full of students, knowing they were being graded on a bell curve, voting on each other’s scores.

I’m in no way saying that most people do this – in fact, it looks like the vast majority are like me and never vote at all, which leads to a low overall vote count that is easy to sway. In turn, when you see vote tallies in the single digits, do these scores really mean anything? And if so, what? Could a low score actually indicate that a comic was funnier than one with a high score (or no score at all)?

While I’m focused on the Dilbert example here, it’s more of a broader question in terms of mass collaboration / wisdom of the crowds platforms – are the incentives of the crowd aligned with the outcome the platform is trying to achieve? In a future post I’ll tackle some examples of situations this has (or might) arise that have far greater implications than how my Dilbert cartoon was rated…

Check out the original, and all the other mash ups, at www.dilbert.com.

Sadly, I don’t think I can compete with the sweater for the dead squirrel today – check out the original, and all the other mash ups, at www.dilbert.com.

I kept thinking there was a twitter joke in here, but I couldn’t come up with it… can you? As always, you can check out the original, and all the other mash ups, at www.dilbert.com.

Please note that the wikinomics blog team in no way supports violence towards those who suggest open source projects. As always, you can check out the original (and all the other mash ups) at www.dilbert.com.

Now I’m REALLY starting to think things being thrown at other people is a dominant theme – see here, here, and here. Or if you prefer, you can check out the original – and all the other mash ups – at www.dilbert.com.

Things being thrown at heads seems to be an emerging theme here… you can check out the original, and all the other mash ups, at www.dilbert.com.

Reminds me of the most innocent sounding insult I ever remember hearing – when asked about the performance of a one-time collaborator, a particular gentleman stared straight ahead for a few seconds and then deadpanned “he met my expectations precisely.” As always, you can check out the original (and all the other mash ups) at www.dilbert.com.

Let’s just say it’s in honour of Canada Day. You can check out all the other mash ups, and the original, at www.dilbert.com.

You can check out the original, and all the other mash ups, at www.dilbert.com.

Check out the original, and all the other mash ups, at www.dilbert.com. Who knows – maybe this one will spark another Friday Dilbert mash up war.

You can check out the original at www.dilbert.com.

You can check out the original, and all the other mash ups, at www.dilbert.com.

Like many of my colleagues (which helps explain the temporarily low blog post count), I’ve been busy at our Enterprise 2.0 conference today – so I thought this mash up would be appropriate. As always, the original can be found at www.dilbert.com.

As always, you can check out the originals, and all the other mash ups, at www.dilbert.com… and you never know, a few more might even pop up here in the comments box as the day goes on.