People Power

Chris Anderson in WIRED Magazin on blogs, user reviews and photo-sharing:

“Now we have armies of amateurs, happy to work for free. Call it the Age of Peer Production. From Amazon.com to MySpace to craigslist, the most successful Web companies are building business models based on user-generated content. This is perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of the second-generation Web. The tools of production, from blogging to video-sharing, are fully democratized, and the engine for growth is the spare cycles, talent, and capacity of regular folks, who are, in aggregate, creating a distributed labor force of unprecedented scale.”

In elearnspace George Siemens comments this view:

“The real story here isn’t that people are “happy to work for free” (they aren’t…we work for many factors, money is only one. Reputation, connections, personal growth – these are all drivers of why people engage in activities without a monetary benefit. For many, monetary value comes in different channels – bloggers may share their ideas for free, but they gain consulting opportunities…the article touches on this briefly at the end.). The real story is that the value point for content has shifted…and that the power to publish and distribute exist at a level that enables anyone to express themselves. Getting others to read and watch is a different matter. Instead of a dozen resources being watched and read by millions, we have a million resources being watched and read by dozens.”