Wikinomics & the 5 big ideas.

Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams published Wikinomics in 2006. Along with Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail theory, this is the other ‘big idea’ about business and commerce in the online age. The chapter headings are similar to Anderson’s: ‘Peer pioneers’. The wiki workplace’, ‘Collaborative minds’ and Enterprise 2.0’ are added to ‘Viral marketing’ and Endless niche’.

The Five Big Ideas

1.Peering – the free sharing of material on the internet – is good news for businesses when it cuts distribution costs to almost zero, but bad news for people who want to protect their creative materials and ideas as intellectual property (IP). So the ‘roar of collaborative culture’ will change economics beyond recognition, and corporations are forced to respond or perish.

2.Free creativity is a natural and positive outcome of the free market, so attempting to regulate and control online ‘remix’ creativity is like trying to hold back the tide. The happy medium is achieved by a service such as Creative Commons, which provides licences which protect IP while at the same time allowing others to remix material within limits.

3.The media is democratised by peering, free creativity and the we media journalism produced by ordinary people.

4.Web 2.0 makes thinking globally inevitable. The internet is the ‘worlds biggest coffeehouse’, a virtual space in which a new blog is created every second. In this instantly global communication sphere, national and cultural boundaries are inevitably reduced.

5.The combination of three things – technology (web 2.0), demographics (young people are described as ‘digital natives’ – they have grown up in a collaborative virtual world which to them is natural and instinctive) and economics (the development of a global economy where business can, and must, think of its market as international, given that traditional, national production structures have declined as we have entered the knowledge economy) – results in a perfect storm, which creates such a force that resistance is impossible, so any media company trying to operate without web 2.0 will be like a small fishing boat on the sea during this freak meteorological occurance.