33. Die Aufmerksamkeit ist die Währung des Internets. Doch der, der viel davon bekommt, kann doch nicht mehr ausgeben als jeder andere. Der Reichtum entkoppelt vom Prassen. Ein Kapitalistenalbtraum.

Für die anderen 41 Thesen bitte hier klicken: “42 finale Thesen zum Internet”

In RiP: A remix manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers.

The film’s central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy? Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, Brazil’s Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow are also along for the ride.

Saturday evening entertainment – watching war movies, “battle of ideas” et al. … via Documentary Heaven

TUXAMOON, an independent German online magazine all things music, literature, society, environment and politics.

Go, check it out, but as far as I can see only german language articles in there. Anyway, Tuxamoon was new to me, funny, yes. Seems like it’s published since 2000. But perhaps they switched their business model from paper/offline to online just recently …

Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma has arranged with his publisher to release his book as a free download. He’s doing a Radiohead, i.e. readers can decide freely if and how much they want to pay him. Recommended book by the way, so go D/L and read Matt’s blog too.

By treating the electronic version of a book as information rather than property, and circulating it as widely as possible, many authors such as Paulo Coelho and Cory Doctorow actually end up selling more copies of the physical version. Pirate copies of The Pirate’s Dilemma are out there online anyway, and they don’t seem to have harmed sales. My guess is they are helping. To be honest, I was flattered that the book got pirated in the first place.

Doch je mehr Musiker diese Quelle anzapfen, desto weniger Geld dürften sie einnehmen.

Auch Kevin Kelly hat dazu eine Meinung: The Reality of Depending on True Fans

I have been researching new business models for artists working in the low end of the long tail. How can one make a living in a micro-niche? Is it even possible, particularly in this realm of no-cost copies?

Gerd Leonhard wurde von der Zeit interviewt

Malte schreibt in der Netzeitung über das Urheberrrecht.

Und Spreeblick testet dieses neue Dingsda namens TV.

by Clay Shirky is an “examination of how the wildfire-like spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form groups and exist within them, with profound long-term economic and social effects-for good and for ill”

It’s about how the tools of the web enable people to organize without formality, but doesn’t stop there but includes ideas about how organizations might use community tools like social software to build stronger customer relations, communities of practice and more

Some take-aways, all highlighting by me:

You can think of group undertaking as a kind of ladder of activities, activities that are enabled or improved by social tools. The rungs on the ladder, in order of difficulty, are sharing, cooperation, and collective action …

Hmm, ladders everywhere – nice metaphor but somehow flawed: We don’t leave the rungs when we step up, we just build upon them.

Anyway, looks interesting. Check out the mp3 of a discussion with Brian Eno and Clay Shirky (there are also some video snippets). Here’s the blurb of this recent evening at ICA:

Everywhere we look, it seems, companies and organisations are trying to harness the alleged wisdom of crowds – the power of groups of people to come together through the internet and share with one another, work together, or take some kind of collective public action. One of the world’s leading experts on social and technological networking, Clay Shirky, Professor in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University and the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising without Organisations, comes to the ICA to talk about how the idea of networks, and particularly online social networks, is changing everything around us.

Experientia has collected more stuff:

- Book site
- Review by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing
- Review by Helen Walters and Matt Vella in Business Week
- Interview with author by The Guardian newspaper

There’s another interview with him, conducted by Jon Lebkowsky at the World Changing site, talking about different media uses and preferences of people:

[Shirky:] Here is my hypothesis: that one of the things that people create some kind of really deep mental model for is modes of communication. People my age and older have a very good sense of when to call someone on the phone, and when to send them a personal letter, and when to go see them. But we don’t have such a good sense of when to email them, or IM them, or Twitter or what have you, because all of that stuff was invented after we had already solidified our sense of the media landscape. All of those things are still new.

And here’s a video of Clay Shirky discussing HCE, found at the Berkman Center, uploaded by Robert to Sevenload for easy embedding:

And there’s also David Weinberger who was live blogging Shirky’s book presentation at Harvard, extracting the key points about group forming, collaboration and the effects of social software:

[...] Now we’re seeing a set of tools that make it easier to create large groups: Ridiculously easy group forming. E.g., email unexpectedly became the dominant service used on the original Internet. That was because of the “reply all” button, a social feature.

But there’s been an enormous social lag. This tech has not transformed society as rapidly as it might. That’s because groups are innately conservative. No one wants a protocol that shuts out group members. It needed to become ubiquitous and boring. That’s when the social effects become interesting.

Well, yes, while we’re not there yet we’ll be there in no time. Now back to Twittering.

Matt Mason’s keynote on The Pirate’s Dilemma, his book on how to compete with piracy, filmed at The Medici Summit, March 3rd 2008 in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Mason discusses why piracy can be an opportunity as well as a threat, how pirates innovate outside of the marketplace and how legitimate businesses can respond.

Using examples from music, fashion, software and the video game industry (to name just a few of the topics covered), Mason makes the case that it is possible to beat pirates offering the same products for free, and that when pirates are adding value to society in some way, society will get behind them, at which point the only way companies can beat them is by compete with them in the marketplace.

Im re:publica-Panel “Was bedeutet das Internet für Musiker, Labels und die Hörer?” (Video bei Hobnox) – einer Podiumsdiskussion mit Lars Lewerenz, Sascha Kösch, Johnny Häusler, Tim Renner und Timor Kodal stand das nicht so im Vordergrund, wohl aber verschiedene Möglichkeiten und Facetten, innovative Geschäftsmodelle usw. der Musikwirtschaft (die eben nicht mit den Herstellern von Tonträgern gleichzusetzen ist …) …

Musik ist wie Wasser verfügbar. Was bedeutet das für Musiker, Labels und die Hörer? Wie gehen Musiker und Labels mit den neuen Möglichkeiten um, eine direkte Kommunikation zu ihren Hörern über soziale Medien zu führen. Wie werden die Fans in den Produktions- und Distributionsprozess eingebunden. Kurz: Welche Erfahrungen wurden mit Musik 2.0 schon gesammelt?

There’s also this slidecast, an extensive website with even more stuff and more:

| View | Upload your own

All of this should remind us that sometimes pirates are among the most avid users of media, are utterly creative in getting around restrictions, are hackers/tweakers/pilot users/avantgarde/ideal players for an open innovation strategy/… and that they just can’t be stopped:

A teenager hacked into the outfit charged with protecting companies like Sony, Universal, and Activision from online piracy—the most daring exploit yet in the escalating war between fans and corporate giants. Guess which side is winning.

young people, hyperconnected to a wide assortment of digital, on-demand media. They are consumers who are no longer bound to linear media; who “snack whenever, wherever and whatever they like

Here’s the video that triggered this meme, by MediaSnackers.com:

Now, these aren’t young people alone, Jeremiah is spot on:

business folks of any age are busy, get information from multiple sources, and need filters

And yes, I understand media snackers and I try to cater to them. Hey, I am not young but I am twittering (yes, I decided against spoiling my neat design by a twitter widget), blogging in +two blogs, contributing to wikis, sharing and spreading my bookmarks, etc etc. After all my profession is social software consulting, so I better keep up and explore new things in this space…

Yet, my social media usage and contributions weren’t designed for media snackers in the first place, rather they evolved over time as my knowledge work needs changed and my understanding of the opportunities and chances of the web grew. So yes, I am trying to offer insights, great content and sometimes little snippets that will be of value, but they must be of value for me first. Blogging and participating is a daily learning experience for me, it’s a personal and a professional thing. Take that media snackers, I don’t really care for you – my posts may be long or spotted with links sometime as they must suit me (and my network, that includes customers) first.

And as this is interesting I’m tagging Robert Basic, kosmar, Nicole Simon, Matthias Schwenk and Cédric to respond.