The irony of capitalism is that profit is dependent on the absence of competition, and as Warren Buffet once explained. Where competition increases, profits goes down. The Publishing 2.0 blog explains that this is having effect on the market for advertising. After citing recent studies, it offers the following comments: “Media 2.0 is about the… Continue reading
Date archives "October 2006"
Publishing 2.0 on the declining rate of profit in a Web 2.0 economy
Stefan Merten on Peer Production and the monetary economy
For more context to these remarks, see the recap page on the Benkler/Lessig/Bauwens/Kleiner debate. With some delay, Stefan Merten of the Oekonux group, which aims to extend Free Software principles to the core of the economy, chimes in on our earlier debate on the same topic: 1. How the Oekonux vision of the GPL society… Continue reading
What is Wine Hacking?
This South-African wine maker has gotten itself in the news by referrring to its practices as wine hacking: “Wine is defined by historical paradigms and perpetuation of old beliefs: Place defining wine instead of a certain ethos of production that actually makes the difference. Many people think that terroir defines a wine, but put the… Continue reading
Book of the Week:the Natural Economic Order, by Silvio Gesell
One of the crucial elements of P2P Theory invoves a needed examination of the issues of Abundance vs. Scarcity, and how to reverse pseudo-scarcity and pseudo-abundance. P2P social dynamics arise most easily in a abundant and/or distributed environment. This refers to the distribution/abundance of intellect, of the means of production (shareable computing), but also crucially:… Continue reading
Mother Jones: Is Google Turning Evil?
Mother Jones asks whether Google is turning evil, and whether you can really trust it. Their answer is negative, focusing on the threat of privacy. Google knows more about you than the NSA, and it can’t and won’t protect such data. “From the start, Google’s informal motto has been “Don’t Be Evil,” and the company… Continue reading
The top of the Long Tail at the P2P Foundation: 10 most popular topics
Here’s a listing of the most visited pages in the first nine months of 2006. The following list refers to subject entries in our P2P Encyclopedia. It excludes biographies, country pages, categories, etc.. Techno-Progressivism (2,967 views) Participatory Spirituality (2,133 views) Open Access (2,024 views) Commons (1,870 views) P2P TV (1,656 views) Creative Commons (1,184 views)… Continue reading
Recommended links for the Week ending Sunday 29/10/2006
I’m going to attempt to make a regular selection of the best links tagged for Del.icio.us: P2P Issues Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism: Mutualism and the State dissussion between social democratic and mutualist opinions, by mutualist Kevin Carson. P2P in the World P2P Trends in Brazil Overview page from the P2P Foundation P2P Education Book… Continue reading
YouTube: From Concept to Hyper-growth
This is a 50 min. talk/presentation by Jawed Karim – one of the three YouTube co-founders – about how and why (social networking) sites like YouTube became so popular in the last couple of years. Although it focuses on the bigger known services this is very interesting to watch. Specially towards the end (last 10… Continue reading
The Evolution Of The Creative Commons Spectrum
[via Social Synergy Bliki] One of the great things about the CreativeCommons license system is that it does not try to force any one solution upon a content creator. CreativeCommons licenses support a range, or spectrum of possibiblities for allowing signaling to others how and when they can re-use your content. Another great attribute is… Continue reading
Examining our assumptions on economies of scale
This thread starting with reading an item of interest in the Post-Autistic Economics newsletter, one of the networks for heterodox economists. In this essay, Ian Fletcher challenges the now common view that contemporary networked computing inevitably leads to decentralization of the economy, or of the economic sectors in which they are applied. His essay shows… Continue reading
There should only be one rule: there are no rules!
The title of this post probably reminds you of an American action film, maybe best-of-the-best. Rules can be good. Rules are there to make life easier. However, nowadays there are so many rules that they even bite each other. Take for example the healthcare sector. People who work in this sector spend most of their… Continue reading
The language pages at the P2P Foundation
A comment by Bas Reus on our previous statistical review of the relative popularity of our categories, reminded me that we did not include the language pages in our review. Our P2P Foundation Wiki has pages in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Thai. But the 2 most popular are the French pages, maintained by Remi Sussan,… Continue reading
Book of the Week, Unbounded Freedom, part two
We introduced the book 2 days ago and are featuring the access links below. We asked Rosemary Bechler, the author, to select significant quotations from the book. Here they are: 1. Excerpts 1. Intro In cultural commons thinking the value of intellectual property is predicated on the right to distribute rather than the right to… Continue reading
Steve Harnad on the difference between open access to code, to text, and to data: an update
I had the recent opportunity to be involved in an email exchange with very interesting people involved in the open access and free software/open source movements, initiated by Richard Poynder. Steven Harnad, a well-known open access and open content activist and practitioner, wrote a wrap-up on his position as to why, despite the commonalities, it… Continue reading
An open service ecology requires compromise: Marc Dangeard
Marc Dangeard, in an interesting contribution to the Open Business debate on Open Services, defends the corporate role in Web 2.0, arguing that certain compromises with reality are needed to make such services sustainable: “On this matter as I see it, there is what would be ideal (from the theoretical point of view) and then… Continue reading