Who owns the wisdom of the crowd? The crowd.
There are lots of issues unsettled around who owns what in our new online world where our whole is worth a heckuva lot more than the sum of our parts.
Who owns my actions and attention and trust… but me? Who owns the wisdom of the crowd… but the crowd? And what about those who enable the crowd to be so smart… what do they own?
And is “own” the right verb? Or is it “control?” Or is it all just “sharing?”
This is inspired by Fred Wilson’s and Brad Burnham’s event about peer production and also by my hissyfit about my Yahoo account, below. I’ll try to come down to earth from the former and rise up from the snarkiness of the latter and discuss this on three levels: the individuals, the collectives, and the enablers.
Before I start, it’s important to say that lots of people are way ahead of me here: Seth Goldstein, Marc Canter, Steve Gillmor, Mary Hodder, and many more.
On the individual level, I want to own or control my stuff, don’t you? That is a given that too many companies and institutions forget. Thus my first law of media and life: Give us control and we will use it. The corollary: Don’t give us control and you will lose us.
So I want to control the things I create: my content (this blog); my identity (my addresses); my collections of neat things (my bookmarks); my analysis (my tags); my reputation (my eBay rating), my behavior (my history, my clicks). What does control mean? I want to be assured that somebody else can’t muck with or kill it. I want to be able to use it wherever I want — and that means I need it to be portable.
I also want to control the things I consume: my content (obviously, I pick the sites, shows, words I take in); my advertising (I’d like transparent targeting… and so should advertisers, because it would be a helluva lot more effective).
Other players may try to get in the way — keeping me from my stuff, or pushing me to this page instead of that, or showing me this ad because they get paid to do so — but, again, if I ruled my world, this is what I’d want. Less interference means less friction means less inefficiency means greater value… for everybody.
That is a hard lesson for companies and institutions built on centralized control to learn. But it is a lesson of our new economic order.
Now to the collective: The thing that’s new about this new world is that we don’t just consume. In fact, the act of consumption is now an act of creation. There are so many examples. When I search on Google, I am finding stuff for me but when I click, I am adding to the wisdom of the crowd that makes Google more effective for every searcher who follows me. When I create my iTunes playlist I am also programming my personal iTunes radio station, which I can share; that’s still individual. But when my listening habits join in at LastFM, I’ve now contributed to a collective and that collective pays me back with recommendations (hear Fred on this). When I consume content and want to save it on Del.icio.us or other such services, that’s an individual act. But the tags we create together yield amazing wisdom of the crowd that can be useful in helping people discover content, in organizing the web around topics again, in improving search results, and even in improving ad performance. See also Tagyu, which takes the tagging, categorizing, organizing wisdom of the crowd to tag and organize other content. There’s a lot of value there.
So who owns that collected wisdom of the crowd? I’d say the crowd does. Others merely borrow it if they continue to have the trust of the crowd and if they pay dividends back to that crowd. And if those others try too hard to control that wisdom, to limit its use and the sharing of it, then they not only reduce the value of it — under the theory (and it’s still a theory) that a smaller crowd is less wise — but they also risk turning away the crowd that creates this value. Here’s Om Malik on this very point:
I wondered out loud, if this culture of participation was seemingly help[ing] build businesses on our collective backs. So if we tag, bookmark or share, and help del.icio.us or Technorati or Yahoo become better commercial entities, aren’t we seemingly commoditizing our most valuable asset - time.
I don’t think it’s our time we’re contributing but, indeed, our wisdom: the way we think, the way we look at the world: That’s what’s really valuable, for it allows others to speak directly to us in our own language. Om continues:
We become the outsourced workforce, the collective, though it is still unclear what is the pay-off. While we may (or may not) gain something from the collective efforts, the odds are whatever “the collective efforts†are, they are going to boost the economic value of those entities. Will they share in their upside? Not likely!
Well, but we all get a better search engine in Google thanks to Google collecting our wisdom, no? Google then creates value on top of that in the form of highly targeted advertising and we don’t share in that. In other words, besides getting better searches, do we and should we also get money? Attention Trust would say that we should get value from our attention (though I’ll admit I still haven’t fully figured out their gospel). More Om:
Take Skype as an example - it rides on our broadband pipes, for which we a hefty monthly charge. It uses our computers and pipes to replace a network that cost phone companies billions to build. In exchange we can make free phone calls to other Skype users. I have no problems with that. I had no problems with Skype charging me for SkypeIN and SkypeOUT calls as well, for this was only a premium service only to be used if and when needed.However, now that it is part of eBay, I do cringe a little….
It’s still just economics: an exchange of value. But the value now comes in many forms, not just money.
Which brings us to the enablers: Google, Del.icio.us, Yahoo, eBay, LastFM, iTunes, CraigsList, Wikipedia, Skype, Technorati, PubSub, IceRocket, and on and on. This is the peer production we explored at the Union Square event (and if you dare, you can read the whole transcript here.) I learned a lot at that session and it’s only now sinking in.
The question is: What do the enablers deserve for enabling? And what do we as individuals and as members of the collective deserve for creating the wisdom? What do we owe each other in this exchange of value?
Or the real question is: How do we not screw this up?
There are so many ways we can screw it up. Spam, hate, stupidity, and control can do that. But if everyone behaves the right way, then we create great whole larger than the sums of their parts; every capitalized entity above proves that. But we’re still trying to figure out what the rules are, what “the right way” means.
The truth is that we’re doing nothing less than creating a new society and we’re still figuring out what the rules and economies of that society are.
As Yale’s scary smart Yochai Benkler said at the Union Square event:
A whole set of other behaviors that have grown up in the household, in friendships, in communities, the motivations that they capture, the signals that get people to explain what it is that they desire, how they desire, what they want to do, what they’re trying to do, all of these things are suddenly becoming integrated into the core economic activities of the most advanced economists, and all of the players inside of these economies need to begin to think. It’s a new set of social competition. It’s a new set of opportunities. It’s a new solution space for ways to solve production problems. And we need to start learning how to live with, use, provide platforms for, use the outputs of without undermining this new set of social cultural practices.
In short: Life is being integrated into the economies of developed nations. It’s nothing less than that.
Some more lessons from that day:
Tom Evslin said that we are proving to have a build in “urge to cooperate:”
Anthropologically we have a much greater urge to cooperate and to do cooperative things than we knew that we had as a species. [For example] the help forums that grow up around every possible service where there’s a bunch of volunteers basically providing export because they want to. I think what happened is is that we assumed that people only did things that they got paid for doing…
But, again, we get paid in other ways: In getting knowledge back, in knowing we are building something together, in feeling a sense of empowerment and ownership, in just feeling good.
Evslin also said that if you’re going to try to build a large network — a community, collective, society, whatever you want to call it — on top of this phenomenon and using the infrastructure that technology now permits, then you’re best off building the largest network possible first without regard to profit, which will limit yourself and thus limit the network you are building.
I think lesson one is don’t try to build a business and network at the same time….Let’s forget Reed’s Law for a moment because Metcalf’s Law is steep enough, that everyone knows that Metcalf’s Law says use networks that increase value, and everybody forgets the converse, which is small networks have no value. And so what value is there to the first few users in joining a small network. Almost none. And so you can’t extract anything in return. You can’t put friction in the way of people joining a small network. You have to make it incredibly attractive and easy. That’s the secret of Skype’s success. They only had distribution experience. Then they used that, and they didn’t introduced Skype in and Skype out because it would have been a distraction until they reached critical network mass.
So if you build openly to build as big and as fast as possible, then you’ll be in the best position to figure out where the value for you is. (And, yes, that sounds like Bubble 1.0 but the difference now is that you can build with less investment; you can build as so many of the companies listed in this post have, with very little.) So… Google built a collective search engine to build an ad company. Skype built a collective phone company to sell to a commerce company. Others (I’d list Technorati, Del.icio.us, and Craig’s List here) are still trying to figure this out.
Tim O’Reilly talked about the empowerers and how they succeed under the Evslin model by not trying to hold onto too much as you build:
A defining characteristic seems to be how much is the value of the system you try to capture. You know, if you look at something like Ebay or Google, even though they’re very, very successful companies, they’re actually pretty generous in creating value for people outside the company, and you know, versus say if you look at sort of the traditional walled garden kind of company, there’s really not that opportunity for creating value. You know, Pierre likes to point out how many people make a living on Ebay and how the social goal of getting people to trust each other is intrinsic to the value of the system at creating an economic opportunity for people.
To which Mark Pincus replied that eBay created a wall around its reputation system, not allowing people to export and use their trust ratings, and that’s screwing it up.
There was much discussion about the point at which things do get screwed up: Somebody grows by being open. Then they want to stay on top so they exert control (getting greedy about trying to keep you in or about money or information). When they exert too much control, then competitors can gang up by being more open (regaining the advantage that made the big guy big) or the public the big guy serves can desert.
All of which is to say that there are values that must be shared to succeed. But we’re still not sure what those values are; we’re still scribbling down Hammurabi’s Code. Once again, we are building a new society here.
I believe we start with the notions that:
* We all want to control our contributions.
* We all want the community to benefit if we in turn benefit.
* We expect mutual trust in the forms of transparency and honesty
* And we all — individual, collective, enabler — find uncivil behavior (spam, fraud, hate) unacceptable.
But there’s one more fundamental notion that informs this new society, a notion that big companies and institutions invariably forget because they were build in the old order:
This is no longer a centralized world, a world controlled by those institutions. This is a decentralized world, a world controlled by us.
And if you try to take control away from us, you will lose. It used to be that you could take control away from us and we had nowhere to go. But in this post-scarcity world, we can always go somewhere else for content or information or service. There’s always another news story, always another email service, always another search engine. Thus my first law, once again: Give us control and we will use it. Don’t and you will lose us.
October 26th, 2005 at 4:49 pm
Hi Jeff,
I’m the Executive Director of AttentionTrust–we talked at the Recovery 2.0 meeting in SF a few weeks ago. The, uh, “Gospel According to AttentionTrust” is really pretty straightforward: Whenever we pay attention to something (or ignore something), data is created–this “attention data” is a potentially valuable resource, and we all have right to own, manage, and exchange our data.
Toward that end, AttentionTrust has a three-part mission:
1) Educate people about the existence of “attention data,” i.e. metadata that reflects what we pay attention to (and what we ignore) and its potential value as a resource.
2) Empower people to exert greater control over their own attention data–our first initiative in this area is the recent release of the AttentionTrust Extension, an “attention recorder” in the form of a Firefox extension that allows users to record and share aspects of their clickstream and browsing history.
And 3) Build a community of individuals and organizations that agree to respect users’ rights to own, manage and exchange their attention data in a transparent environment that allows users to decide who has access to their data and how it’s used.
Folks like Steve Gillmor, Seth Goldstein and Mary Hodder–all of whom are on the AttentionTrust Board of Directors–certainly have their own perspective on this and I expect they’d add a few things that I’ve left out. But we’re in agreement on these basic principles, and if that’s not being clearly communicated on our website, then I need to make some changes.
Ed
October 26th, 2005 at 4:57 pm
And in giving us control, don’t think you can structure it so as to make it hard for us to leave - those “walled gardens” - by making it easy and attractive to produce the content and then think we can be treated as you like and we will put up with it since we have a vested interest in remaining with your service.
Nothing has fundamentally changed. We will always have to occasionally reevaluate our reasons for doing business with someone. If they’re not satisfying our needs or are doing things we think make no sense, we’ll do what people have always done and take our business or attention elsewhere. That’s the way the market is always going to work. The minor inconvenience of uploading our content somewhere else or establishing ourselves in a new community won’t be enough to stop us.
Manipulation won’t work.
October 26th, 2005 at 6:45 pm
On the one hand, one [a member of the public or community to which it is attached and sharing] has possession, on the other, criminally, commercially, or other, a force that is willing and able to suck the life blood from those ‘witting’ and unwitting, in the form of our identifiable footprints; ok, silhouettes.
Nothing is sacred - not anymore. Nothing is ours - not anymore. Was it ever? Doubtful.
The optimistic mission never seems to cater for preemptive protection, and only steps in with retrospective action, using 20-20 hindsight. Did you see that? There it was… Gone! Too late.
One can avoid showing one’s slip by means of non-participation - participate at your peril, or send them a bill.
“Don’t listen to their words; fix your attention on their deeds.” Albert Einstein
October 26th, 2005 at 6:52 pm
What value does del.icio.us add? They allow me to manage my bookmarks from any computer in the world, you call it portability. Well what if someone created an open source Wordpress plugin that replicated those features? In a few years, (sure this sounds crazy) when mobile broadband is ubiquitous, everybody will have a server somewhere (probably LAMP). Personal servers will be like cellphones are now though hopefully easier to use.
That means we won’t need Flickr or Del.icio.us to store our content anymore. Google will still have the ads next to its search results but it’s entirely possible that tagging (Flock could make it ubiquitous) will out do Google’s spam succeptable web crawler system. In fact Google hires people to spot check data. If you apply something like Reddit.com’s up/down voting system to del.icio.us then spam might just cease to be a problem (imagine a button on a web browser that you could click to flag a spam site). Or think Hot or Not but for websites.
So in 10 years when IPV6 is out and everybody can have a handful of IP addresses(phone numbers for servers) for next to nothing, and everybody has their own server instead of using a federation of web based services with quazi-open APIs, we will be in control of our own information. Netflix-esque recommendations will work for websites, photos, ideas, etc. and search engines as we know them would become useless when enough people are tagging. I already use del.icio.us more than Google to find stuff. Same thing with Flickr and images instead of images.google.com.
Web 3.0 (I know I know, and assuming the gray goo doesn’t get us) might be the same as web 2.0 except instead of using large corporate web apps, we’ll just apt-get the latest greatest version of OpenSource-Flickr and run it on our personal servers. This will probably start with plugins but it might eventually evolve into a big, well integrated application that handles blogging, tagging, photos, an open version of skype to store voice/video mail, bittorrent, me-mail server, and all sorts of preferences. It’d be far more economical to do this with shared hosting and stream content to whatever odd little devices we’re using at that time.
The advantage of centralization is that it’s simple to create something like the “Flickr Interesting Photos from the last 24 hours” page. The only way to solve that problem would be with some sort of newfangled peer to peer system assuming they’re not outlawed by then. So corporations will no longer have a monopoly on centralization.
And that is why I think Flock is a big deal. It brings tagging to the masses. If Firefox and/or IE encourage a user to create an account somewhere before bookmarks work the search problem takes care of it self.
My point is that we can regain control by using open source alternatives to the current big web2.0 apps on our own servers. An open source search engine is only possible if it takes advantage of the wisdom of the crowds. That’ll be possible when everybody starts tagging.
October 26th, 2005 at 7:12 pm
KirkH, what you say makes sense to me.
October 26th, 2005 at 7:55 pm
People need to look into this. http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1529In%20peace
October 26th, 2005 at 9:17 pm
Brilliant piece. Open data will become a primary demand for activist consumers. Today’s idealistic youth (of which I am an only recently proud member) will contribute their money and energy only where they can be assured that their energy will be shared back with the community.
A walled garden will just simpy not be able to compete with the network of small pieces, loosely joined, that is now swiftly assembling. Asembling, I might add, with our without venture capital.
October 27th, 2005 at 6:37 am
The admission fee for the Web 2.0 Conference was $2800. Clearly, Tim O’Reilly owns the wisdom of the crowd.
October 27th, 2005 at 7:30 am
I told some folks at the meeting that the admission to Web 2.1 was $2.80 and I found the best company I found there.
October 27th, 2005 at 4:13 pm
[...] Jeff Jarvis talks about the brave new world and mentions three entities: the Individual, the Collective and the Enablers in his fascinating post: Who owns the wisdom of the crowd? The crowd. On the individual level, I want to own or control my stuff, don’t you? That is a given that too many companies and institutions forget. Thus my first law of media and life: Give us control and we will use it. The corollary: Don’t give us control and you will lose us. [...]
October 27th, 2005 at 5:16 pm
[...] Who owns the wisdom of the crowd? The crowd. [...]
October 28th, 2005 at 9:28 am
Jeff:
This is a landmark post. Thanks.
I posted more on this subject at http://blog.tomevslin.com/2005/10/bubble_20_who_o.html
October 28th, 2005 at 10:52 am
Lots of questions about how the value we create doesn’t end up with us. Is it too simple to just buy a couple of share in Google?
October 28th, 2005 at 11:59 am
Jeff
Just signed up for the Beta of Yahoo Publisher Network and while setting up the Ads yesterday on my blog ‘Serge the Concierge’ found out that I could not I quote ” be displaying other contextual ads on the same page as Yahoo Ads”.
I am not very keen on that either or ‘choice’.
I removed the Yahoo Ads to give myself some time to think about it.
Who controls who?
Serge
http://sergetheconcierge.typepad.com
http://creativebusiness.typepad.com
October 28th, 2005 at 12:32 pm
I’m a little confused. The rhetoric is definitely thought provoking and inspiring. But the reality seems, well, unreal.
“The wisdom of crowds” is a fascinating subject — but its as old as the hills, no?
The brilliant folks at Claris (or whoever) dreamed up Prism Clusters — a truly novel and useful set of direct marketing tools based on algorithms for sorting demographic and other data — and built a business on same. Are you saying Claris doesn’t outright own those algorithms and business?
Indeed, one can argue the entire finance and securities markets are derived from creating algorithms to parse “the wisdom of crowds” — but doesn’t Warren Buffet deserve the right to derive whatever profit and glory he can from that? Or does he owe something other than “the pause that refreshes” to the billions of consumers who guzzle Coca Cola?
Taken to its natural conclusion, I fear your argument devolves into basic debate over property rights. Which is not to say such arguments are not worth revisiting, perhaps continuously. But it’s a little hard to imagine that the technology and venture capital community would ever seriously abandon the basic tenets of intellectual property protection and public market securities underwriting which have made so many so fabulously succesful?
November 1st, 2005 at 3:57 am
[...] You know what? If I lose my say around my own generated content, you can bet I won’t think twice in vacating the premises and I’m sure I won’t be the only one. For more on the subject and an interesting read, see Jeff Jarvis’ Buzz Machine, who owns the wisdom of the crowds? the crowd … of course. If we only knew who that was!!! [...]
November 3rd, 2005 at 12:24 am
[...] Who owns the wisdom of the crowd? The crowd. With everyone happily using free web2.0 services such as Flickr, delicious, digg, etc, are we losing our ownership of ideas to commercial entities? Keywords: blogs, folksonomy, social, trends, web2.0 [...]
December 24th, 2005 at 4:40 pm
[...] The point of all this is that I wonder what our rights are as an aggregate, as a community. It’s not unrelated to the question of who owns the wisdom of the crowd: [...]
January 7th, 2006 at 7:11 pm
[...] I, too, am looking forward to Yochai Benkler’s book, The Wealth of Networks. Benkler left me slackjawed here. [...]
January 11th, 2006 at 1:17 am
Excellent post and, appropriately, the comments are just as good. The discussion reminds me of something Harlan Cleveland says, which is no one is in charge. Ownership then starts to take on a different meaning. It’s not just about what I can keep the rights to and be compensated for, but also how much I’m willing to lead and cooperate with the thousands and eventually millions of others who are also willing to lead in their small part of the world.
January 17th, 2006 at 6:08 am
[...] Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine, http://www.buzzmachine.com/index.php/2005/10/26/who-owns-the-wisdom-of-the-crowd-the-crowd/, tackles this contradiction between community production and private appropriation head on, in what is definitely a landmark post, and asks: “who owns the wisdom of crowds”. His key question is: can the user-capitalization model, which works for Skype and many other new models, result in user ownership, and if not, what is the right relationship between the user communities, that produces the wealth, and the platform, which enables it. [...]
February 3rd, 2006 at 5:31 am
[...] Jeff Jarvis has some excellent thoughts on ownership of the wisdom of crowds, where he solidly argues the crowd owns itself, making a great point that we need to be left alone to do our thing. If someone, anyone, tries to take control they’ll lose us. He also asks a really good question - ‘How do we not screw this up?’ [...]
March 3rd, 2006 at 3:38 pm
[...] Jeff Jarvis writing on his blog Buzzmachine, posted in late 2005 “ Who owns the wisdom of the crowd?†in which he said, “…there’s one more fundamental notion that informs this new society, a notion that big companies and institutions invariably forget because they were built in the old order. [...]
March 5th, 2006 at 3:45 am
[...] The reviews are in: We, the people, are in the drivers seat. [...]
March 31st, 2006 at 1:47 pm
[...] This article is similar to many discussions taking place on the net-today. It can be thought of as a collective self-awaking that comes about in the questioning the power of the context provider and their exclusive right of mediating the participation of the masses in the non-scarcity environment of the Web. Who owns the wisdom of the crowd by Jeff Jarvis hits some of these issues in a lengthy postings a few months ago, and of course he fallowed many others. [...]
April 2nd, 2006 at 7:52 am
[...] But this isn’t just do-goooder business. It is, instead, the realization that the politicians never owned politics and the businesses never owned the market and journalists never owned the news. The people do. And that’s damned hard for some to get their heads around. It’s especially hard for the the politicians, the reporters, the moguls — the powerful. [...]
May 13th, 2006 at 1:44 pm
[...] If, in fact, it is aggregate data they are using to discover those exceptions, then we need to ask a new question that isn’t really being addressed in the networked world: Who owns the wisdom of the crowd? If the people own it, then one could argue that the government, acting as the people, may seek and use that data unless we, the people, forbid it through law. There is, of course, a proper debate about whether the law does allow it. There is also a proper debate over whether this is a necessary and prudent weapon in finding terrorists (and whether that is being done effectively). Indeed, a Washington Post poll says that 63 percent of Americans consider this an “acceptable way for the federal government to investigate terrorism.” And didn’t we protest that our government did not do a good enough job analyzing data and intelligence to prevent 9/11? If someone had been analyzing patterns of enrollment in flight schools — hmm, why are an abnormally high number of Saudis suddenly learning how to fly passenger jets? — then could we have stopped them? A further question is whether we have a right to know that all this is going on or whether that public knowledge cripples this investigation and our safety. Finally, it is not clear that releasing aggregate data necessarily violates individuals’ privacy. My point is that this isn’t as simple as raising the tattered-from-overuse privacy flag. Neither is this as simple as raising the also tattered war-on-terrorism flag. [...]
July 2nd, 2006 at 7:36 am
[...] That is why we deserve to know more about your standards and your process. That is not only because we have a right to know what you do in nomen publicus [please do correct my automated Latin] but also because we, too, have a voice that matters. Many people questioned Judith Miller’s WMD reporting and think how much better it would have been if those questions had been heard and answered. Note that USA Today just backed off elements of its NSA telephone story, after the cat was out of the bag. And about the NSA telephone program, I was not alone suggesting that this “eavesdropping,” as The Times calls it — a purposely loaded word that implies spooks are listening in on our conversations — was more about data mining to find patterns and thus, we hope, anomalies than to hear about who’s having an affair. In both the NSA phone and the Swift banking programs, it seems apparent that you need to analyze a body of data to find the outliers who may be worth investigating. This isn’t as simple as it is being portrayed: as another violation of our individual privacy. I don’t consider the analysis of the aggregated data to which I contribute with my individual actions a violation of my privacy. And if this catches or stops terrorists — as many, including the 9/11 Commission, believe that tracking and analyzing financial transactions can do — then I say it is worth it. But neither is the questioning of these programs as simple as it is being portrayed; it’s not treason. [...]
July 18th, 2006 at 10:24 am
[...] I wrote about this second point back January at the Smartmobs weblog. Actually, I was writing about what Jeff Jarvis wrote about the levels of scale in peer production networks: Jarvis asserts that there are “individual”, “collective” and “enabler” (like Yahoo, Google, Wikipedia, etc) levels of scale involved in peer production networks. [...]
August 19th, 2006 at 10:33 am
[...] So all of this leads to my law — everybody has to have a law — which I think I first stated here and have restated ad nauseum. [...]
October 26th, 2006 at 10:29 am
[...] Theo van Stegeren over the Wisdom of Crowds Aanmerkingen op de Wisdom of Crowds Jeff Jarvis: who owns the wisdom of the crowd? [...]
November 9th, 2006 at 1:35 pm
[...] Who owns the wisdom of the creative crowd? - BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis Siehe dazu auch: Who profits from user generated content? - DIY Media Weblog November 9, 2006 | In Uncategorized | [...]
February 5th, 2007 at 4:42 pm
[...] This is clearly not a new debate, but one in which many people have engaged in the past - including Jeff Jarvis, Om Malik, and Tom Evslin, just to name a few. [...]
February 7th, 2007 at 8:37 am
[...] Lesenswert dazu sind Jeff Jarvis, Tom Evlsin und The Future of Communities. [...]
February 9th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
[...] Â Ich bin mir sicher, dass die Readers Edition in wenigen Monaten ganz anders aussehen wird als heute. Wie? Das wird, weil ich ein überzeugter Fan der “Weisheit der Massen” bin, sehr stark davon abhängen, wer mitmacht und uns auf diesem spannenden Weg aktiv und kritisch begleitet. Es wird auf diesem Weg Überraschungen und Enttäuschungen geben, Fortschritte, Korrekturen, Quantensprünge und Rückschläge. Lassen wir uns gemeinsam überraschen. [...]
February 14th, 2007 at 11:50 am
[...] Jeff Jarvis writing on his blog Buzzmachine, posted in late 2005 “ Who owns the wisdom of the crowd?†in which he said, “…there’s one more fundamental notion that informs this new society, a notion that big companies and institutions invariably forget because they were built in the old order. This is no longer a centralized world, a world controlled by those institutions. This is a decentralized world, a world controlled by us. And if you try to take control away from us, you will lose. It used to be that you could take control away from us and we had nowhere to go. But in this post-scarcity world, we can always go somewhere else for content or information or service. There’s always another news story, always another email service, always another search engine. Thus my first law, once again: Give us control and we will use it. Don’t and you will lose us.†[...]
March 7th, 2007 at 11:23 am
Jeff,
I really found your thoughts very interesting so want to add my two cents.
The first thing worth mentioning is there is a pradox in all of us. We want to control our contribution, our profiles, our behaviors but at the same time we want to access all kinds of information. These two approaches are ad odds with each other. I am fond of my privacy as much as you. On the other hand, I’m getting very frustrated when I’m unable to access research material because it is propriatery. This is very frustrating to me but from the property owner standpoint he is putting much labor to create that property and my desire is accessing it without any labor, in other words returning no value to the owner.
The second thing, from the content we create, the bookmarks we share some parties are making money out of it. Google, Yahoo, etc. are selling ads, creating value-added services but I cannot say that this is very unfair. Well, I agree that they are using my shared material(annoying) but some people working for those companies are making a living and they are putting effort to improve the value they’re adding to us. One more thing, ad-supported business model is not actually very bad because at least they are not charging me. Are we paying money to use the search engine? No..Are we paying money to use YouTube, Facebook? No… I think this is something good for all of us, right? The content is mine but the platform is theirs.
Some people could say then we can create a free web space and keep using web 2.0 gifted tools but I’m pretty sure some people’ll eventually start thinking how we can commercialize this space. Most of us are unfortunately money-oriented.
Batu
March 13th, 2007 at 9:10 am
[...] end, it is our data). She doesn’t quite get it, talking about sharing data with a company. Who owns the wisdom of the crowd? She shows a chart that associates words with the concept safety and groups them: children, life, [...]
June 28th, 2007 at 2:52 am
[...] Update: Lees ook Jeff Jarvis’ artikel ‘Who owns the wisdom of the crowd? The crowd.’. [...]
August 27th, 2007 at 11:24 am
[...] Jarvis almost two years ago made what to my reading was the seminal stab in this direction with his Who owns the wisdom of the crowd? The crowd. In this fledgling age of crowdsourcing, micropayment systems are already well established, both in [...]
August 31st, 2007 at 5:44 am
[...] Who owns the wisdom of the crowd? The crowd.." BuzzMachine. 26 Oct 2005. 12 Jun 2007 <http://www.buzzmachine.com/2005/10/26/who-owns-the-wisdom-of-the-crowd-the-crowd/>.Suggested Reading: Wyrick, Brian, and Dmytri Kleiner. "Infoenclosure [...]
September 5th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
[...] Who owns the wisdom of the crowd? The crowd..” BuzzMachine. 26 Oct 2005. 12 Jun 2007 <http://www.buzzmachine.com/2005/10/26/who-owns-the-wisdom-of-the-crowd-the-crowd/>. Suggested [...]
October 14th, 2007 at 9:02 am
[...] And in the end, we mustn’t forget that we, the media, do not own the product of this collaboration. The community does. Jarah Euston said there was some resentment when her Fresno Famous was sold to the Fresno Bee. The community thought they owned this; that’s exactly what you hope will happen when you enable people to collaborate through you: they take on ownership. That’s thinking like a platform: you provide it and people build atop it. At the end, who owns the wisdom and effort of the crowd? Why, of course, the crowd does. [...]
January 30th, 2008 at 9:46 am
[...] so bleibt das Phänomen Wisdom of Crowds vorläufig eher noch ein bewundertes Konzept, während Croudsourcing in vielen Facetten schon Verbreitung [...]
April 15th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
[...] Who owns the wisdom of the crowd? The crowd. (tags: economics community web2.0 crowdsourcing) Bookmark to: [...]
April 16th, 2008 at 9:32 am
Jeff Jarvis första lag…
Vi lever i en värld som pÃ¥ sistone har börjat kallas “post-scarcity”. Överflödet av innehÃ¥ll och tjänster är överväldigande - och gillar du inte nÃ¥got finns det alltid en annan nyhetsartikel, en annan e-posttjänst, en annan sökmotor som …