captaindarling99 's Profile

My argument was that the publisher roles would change drastically, but the
need for some top-down selection and guidance would only increase in value. As
the amount of content expanded, the demand for some intelligent guidance and
selection would be worth a lot to some people. The work of most unedited
amateurs was simply not interesting or reliable enough for me. 

But it doesn't take very long to discover -- if we look hard and honestly --
that none of these innovations is pure hive mind, and that the supposed paragon
of adhocracy -- the Wikipedia itself -- is itself far from strictly bottom-up.
In fact a close inspection of Wikipedia's process reveals that it has an elite
at its center, (and that it does have an elite center is news to most). Turns
out there is far more deliberate top-down design management going on than first
appears.  This is why Wikipedia has worked in such a short time.

We are too much in a hurry to wait around for a pure hive mind. Our best
technological systems are marked by the fact that we have introduced intelligent
design into them. This is the top-down control we insert to speed and direct a
system toward our goals. Every successful technological system, including
Wikipedia, has design wired into it. 

More importantly, the brute dumbness of the hive mind produces the raw
material that smart design can work on. If we ONLY listen to the hive mind, that
would be stupid. But if we ignore the hive mind altogether, that is even
stupider. 

In the realm of encyclopedias, we want totally reliable articles that are
the most authoritative in the world, the most understandable in the world, and
the most current in the world. We want news that is relevant, with a low noise
to signal ratio. We want research reports that are unbiased but comprehensive
and consistent.  We want expertise.

We are unlikely to get the level of expertise we want with no experts at all.

I know it is heresy, but it might be that the Wikipedia model is not good for
very much more than writing universal encyclopedias. Other wiki projects to
construct textbooks, species listings, and a search engine have not succeeded --
yet. Perhaps the article length is fortuitously the exactly right length for the
smart mob, and maybe a book is exactly the wrong length.  We'll see.

Here's how I sum it up:  The bottom-up hive mind will always take us
much further than even seems possible. It keeps surprising us in this regard.
Given enough time, dumb things can be smarter than we think.

At that same time, the bottom-up hive mind will never take us to our end
goal. We are too impatient. So we add design and top down control to get where
we want to go. 

The systems we keep will be hybrid creations. They will have a strong
rootstock of peer-to-peer generation, grafted below highly refined strains of
controlling functions.  Sturdy, robust foundations of user-made content and
crowd-sourced innovation will feed very small slivers of leadership agility.
Pure plays of 100% smart mobs or 100% smart elites will be rare.

The real art of business and organizations in the network economy will not be
in harnessing the crowd of "everybody" (simple!) but in finding the appropriate
hybrid mix of bottom and top for each niche, at the right time. The mix of
control/no-control will shift as a system grows and matures.

Typically, people ignore this "share with your friends" pitch. But
Watts and Peretti included technology called ForwardTrack, which displays the
route the ad travels once you've forwarded it. This turned ad forwarding into a
piece of social cartography. People would pass the ad specifically to those
friends most likely to keep it moving. It became a Facebook-like contest to sign
up the most friends.

Micro-incremental growth is an under-appreciated element of successful new
media. This method is way beyond issuing beta versions, because there are no
versions, just ever tiny modifications, some of which are not even improvements
but simply changes. Incrementalism is the way the treasure trove of any archive
(say the back issues of the New York Times) grows -- one nano addition by one
nano addition. It's the "long now" approach to making content. It contrasts with
the discrete model of launching versions, the norm for most creative works.

These eight
qualities require a new skill set. Success in the free-copy world is not derived
from the skills of distribution since the Great Copy Machine in the Sky takes
care of that. Nor are legal skills surrounding Intellectual Property and
Copyright very useful anymore. Nor are the skills of hoarding and scarcity.
Rather, these new eight generatives demand an understanding of how abundance
breeds a sharing mindset, how generosity is a business model, how vital it has
become to cultivate and nurture qualities that can't be replicated with a click
of the mouse.

In short, the money
in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it
follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits.