bootstrapping.net

A media culture consisting of the primary players communicating and negogiating meaning directly as opposed to a secondary media culture where all communication goes through third parties.

Jason Calacanis is getting a lot of heat from his offer to hire digg’s most actice contributors.
A lot of people see this as a sellout against the pure innovator of digg, as a sellout on collective created peer creation, others see it as a way to give some of the monetary value back to the creators of the site compared to a vc-funded startup like Digg where the users isn’t gonna cash out on the value created.
I see it another way…
To me the real issue is that these community-edited and created sites really offers little value in themselves - all the value is created by the users. Why don’t we make them truly community/user-owned when what’s at the center is so little compared to the value created by the users. Like a wikipedia, like an opensource project.
Therefore i salute Jason for exposing the hypocrisy of these web version number sites where the real value isn’t in the tools, but in the collective value created by the users. It might be oldschool, but Jason is at least being straight forward about working for a megacorp wanting to hire people to create value for them.
So who creates a user-owned community edited/created site ?

Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design;

The aim is to create a high profile design institute, which is small but dynamic and which interfaces with academia and industry. The institute will become an international setting for new thinking in design and technology in Copenhagen. The institute will encourage multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary learning, teaching and consulting in Interaction Design. We imagine that people both from the academic and the industrial world will come to Copenhagen to work with us on innovative products, services and technology for the future. The institute aims to become an international centre of excellence in interaction design and innovation by 2010. The uniqueness of the institute is that it will incorporate an integrated plan of teaching, research and consulting - all in the same building, at the same time allowing them to influence each other in their vision and philosophy.

Jay Rosen is bootstrapping a very interesting networked journalism project “newassignment.net” combining the wisdom and the funding of the crowd with the ressources of experienced journalists and editors.

Thanks to Chris Anderson’s generous blogger offer i’ve had a copy of his new book “The Long Tail” for review for some weeks now. As i’ve written before i see the image of the the long tail as an iconic image that reshapes our perspective of the world. The icon that ends our mass culture/mass society and sends us in many new directions. A tribute to diversity. A tribute to the sustainability of micro.

Should i read it?
Yes. It’s extremely well-written and an pretty easy read too.

What do you like about?
- that it’s based on actual research data
- that it paints the changes in a historical context
- that it has pretty progressive statements about copyright reform
- the pre/post filter
- the context in which filters are explained

Is it too much a hit?
Well, it’s an easy read . And the publishers shaped it as a business book hit. So yes, it’s been prefiltered to become an hit.

Is The Long Tail an unified theory of the world?
Not really. I would personally prefer to see it as an iconic book and touch on the new perspectives and models (the pre/post filtering could be pretty deep and widely applied to change a lot of fields), but the single chapter that is dedicated to non-entertainment is inherently not that detailed. And a lot of it smells like platforms/ecosystems (salesforce example) that has been possible for a long time and really more is opening up for the possibility of a platform/ecosystem (think the success of Microsoft’s third party developers or how PageMaker saved the Apple Macintosh) than inventory economics. In a sense most of the book is very loyal to the change in inventory economics which is great, but becomes a bit loose when the the long tail metaphor is applied to a variety of phenomenons.

You say it’s an iconic image, is it also an iconic book?
In a 1-2 year time frame it’s pretty iconic and agenda setting i would believe. Long term it suffers from the publishers need to have a short term hit i think.

But read it and decide for your self.

Mark Hursts fabulous experience design conference GEL is coming to Copenhagen on the 1st of September. I attended the first GEL conference in the US and can recommend it greatly. I’ve signed up myself to support.

Brian Eno, The Big Here and the Long Now

‘Now’ is never just a moment. The Long Now is the recognition that the precise moment you’re in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future. The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes. It’s ironic that, at a time when humankind is at a peak of its technical powers, able to create huge global changes that will echo down the centuries, most of our social systems seem geared to increasingly short nows. Huge industries feel pressure to plan for the bottom line and the next shareholders’ meeting. Politicians feel forced to perform for the next election or opinion poll. The media attract bigger audiences by spurring instant and heated reactions to ‘human interest’ stories while overlooking longer-term issues – the real human interest.

Studies shows that file sharing only seems to have hit record sales of the bigname artists and not the mass of musicians. Other stats shows touring revenue was up 24.6% compared to last year for mainly the big name artists.
Could it be that big name hit artists can make a fine living in the copy age?

An old observation i’ve never gotten around to blog that resurfaced in a conversation today.
The public sector wants to be like the private sector (control, markets, privatization, middle management, reporting, centralization, branding, r&d) while the private sector wants to be like what the public sector used to be (decentralization, democratic organizations, deep purposes, social responsibility, user innovation, conversations).
Interesting what will end up in the middlespace.

Dan Hill keeps amazing me.