The Idea Dude

CONNECTING THE DOTS ONE AT A TIME

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Mob 1.0

There's an interesting interview given by Paul Kedrosky as part of the Under The Radar conference. Paul's blog, Infectious Greed always has something punchy and interesting on Web 2.0. He jokingly thinks it should be renamed Bubble 2.0 because so many of these young startups will die...survival of the fitness is the name of the game. Methinks it should be called Mobs 1.0 ushering the age of collaboration, (I would hesitate to call them smart) but there is definitely a mob mentality in Web 2.0. And it's not just the young and the hip who are getting it, see Daniel Terdiman's article on company executives collaborating in guilds in the Warcraft world.

I like Mob 1.0...it's what happens when there is anarchy (see the splog phenomenon), and everything is free...(I can think of couple of product names like Flickr Free and movies like Blog Free) but levity aside, almost everything you need to survive in a virtual online world is available (and free) from email, photo journals, blogging, IM, VOIP, open source software, online fantasy games, information...what is the new frontier for the digital economy. Seems like we've gone full circle and the equity is the eyeball. Check out young companies like Kaboodle and Blogburst. The prize, advertising dollars...(sounds like a throwback to the early 90's, when an artifact called a web page first appeared). Retro is in.

Dial the clock forward 5 years from now, hopefully we don't have the situation of one of the Internet gorillas devouring what's left of the digital debris and bought your loyalty for a song (or is that an iTune?) no doubt sparking more DOJ activity. I have visions of online communities having drunk from the Free fountain wake up one morning to Hotel California and find out that they can check out but they can never leave...

Drink the KoolAid but beware of the freebie...everything has a price...

As the saying goes, "Let a thousand flowers bloom", so was the Cultural Revolution an exercise in mass collaboration?

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