This link has been bookmarked by 76 people . It was first bookmarked on 29 Mar 2006, by Dan Phillips.
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03 Sep 12
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Free is not a pricing strategy, a marketing strategy, or the inevitable consequence of a market with low variable costs. It's a symptom of a much more fundamental economic shift.
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..in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.
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John Hagel summarized the arguments here. These insights into the economy of attention offer a powerfully explanatory perspective in the debate about Free and explain why Free will be the dominant media model of the near future.
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In a world where facts are readily available, from multiple sources, basic information will be commoditized.
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Both sides of the debate about Free do not seem to acknowledge how fundamentally different the relationship between suppliers and consumers is on the web. Services are not offered for free at all. There is an exchange of value between users, the creators of the raw material - data, content, and meta-data, and the network where that data is converted into insight. This exchange is still governed by the basic laws of economics but the currency is not dollars, it's attention. The network that takes attention and converts it into insight is also quite different than a traditional firm. The services they provide are more like those we expect from a government than a company. Craigslist, Facebook, and Twitter all provide (or try to provide) a robust stable reliable infrastructure (hosting, bandwidth), security, safety, and dispute resolution. In all three cases, the product users create and consume emerges organically from this environment.
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In a world where the scarce resource is some combination of time, attention, relevance and insight, those commodities become the medium of exchange in a parallel economy alongside traditional currencies, debating what a traditional firm charges for something they produce and distribute to customers who have no role in the product's creation sheds very little light on what is going on today.
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The much more interesting conversation is about the appropriate economic model for a social network that depends on the contributions of its participants and increases in value as more people use it.
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Since Craigslist collapsed a multibillion dollar classified advertising business into a fabulously profitable $100,000,000 business, perhaps we should be talking about the potential deflationary impact of more "zero billion dollar" businesses. As the radical efficiencies of the web seep into more sectors of the economy, and participants in social networks exchange attention instead of dollars, will governments at all levels need to make do with less tax revenue? That's a scary thought in an era of high deficits unless traditional governments can learn from the efficent governance systems of social networks and provide more for less.
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26 Aug 09
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Will RichardsonAnnotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.unionsquareventures.com%2F
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There was broad consensus that the internet is enabling substantial changes in the way we learn and teach. It has always been possible to learn outside of a school setting. The ubiquitous connectivity and very low cost of content production and distribution seems to enable the unbundling of key components of education.
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that they get crushed by the organizing efficiencies of the Internet. But I don't know how to get across that chasm
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Fred is suggesting that the education industry may soon face the same challenges that currently confront the music industry and the newspaper industry. Like those industries, education can be peer produced, delivered as bits, and curated by a community. Like the music and newspaper industries, the cost structures embedded in the education industry's current business models may be very difficult to support in the face of competition from hyper-efficient, web native businesses.
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The day was characterized by this conflict between the technologists and entrepreneurs who were driven by the conviction that we can use what Tim O'Reilly calls the "magic powers" of the web to drive down the cost of learning and increase access to knowledge. This optimistic view was tempered by the concern that education is not music and that the existing structure of education delivers a lot more that knowledge. If the transition from the current high touch, but high cost, learning environment to an efficient peer produced learning network is as abrupt and brutal as the transition we are witnessing in the music and newspaper industry, the social consequences are likely to be a lot more severe.
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This optimistic view was tempered by the concern that education is not music and that the existing structure of education delivers a lot more that knowledge. If the transition from the current high touch, but high cost, learning environment to an efficient peer produced learning network is as abrupt and brutal as the transition we are witnessing in the music and newspaper industry, the social consequences are likely to be a lot more severe.
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If you're trying to have an impact on PS41 where he goes to school, to put it mildly, that's a hell of a challenge. Just to try to have an impact upon the arrival of air-conditioners in June, let alone the curriculum and the budget and other sorts of things. So, I think you have to separate the conversation between the effort to improve the public schools and the effort to improve the non-public school environment. These are two completely different things.
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So in the end, the technologist's enthusiasm for radically reinventing education was tempered by an increased awareness of the broader social role that our educational institutions play and a greater appreciation for the political will needed to bring the full benefits of the web to public schools.
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Justin WhitakerTag: A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage & Startup Investing
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