The Open Business weblog has an interview with Kenneth Neil Cukier, who is a technology correspondent for The Economist, and which is well worth reading, since the magazine represents in some ways the heart of the establishment.

Some excerpts:

Cukier agrees that peer production does not need a business model per se:

“Still, what’s most interesting about what is happening today is that the monetary-incentive-laden marketplace isn’t the only sphere in which economic production is taking place. Yochai Benkler, who was recently interviewed on OpenBusiness, has been an intellectual pioneer for this idea and developed it fully — one might argue a bit too fully! — in his recent book “The Wealth of Networks.â€? So I’d start by questioning the assumption of the question itself: a business model may not be needed and the web 2.0 services still thrive.

That said, if these services aspire to be sustainable and evolve with the market, then yes, they will probably need a commercial model underpinning them. Will online advertising or getting a percentage of affiliate sales-revenue — the classic internet business models today — be enough? What could supplement that? I don’t know. What I’m certain of is that new business models will emerge from out of the very environment of web 2.0 services, just as Google’s keyword advertising system was developed by incorporating the same logic that supported its approach to search itself.”

Cukier also reviews the weaknesses of the peer production model:

“The peer-production model works well in certain areas, less well in others. For instance, it is not clear it can apply to all areas of publishing. And the publishing industry has a long history of adapting to technological changes — and it is very possible that traditional publishers will adopt elements of peer-production and implement it better than the very groups like Wikipedia that gave rise to it in the first place.

Peer-production has shortcomings in accuracy; concision and genius. Many people treat it ideologically: to offer the slightest criticism is to either be an imbecile who doesn’t ‘get it,’ or an evil elitist. It’s become a religious issue — ‘you’re either with us or against us.’ That’s shallow-minded.

The model has erratic accuracy since it is vulnerable to pranksters on one hand and intentional disrupters on the other. But the biggest concern comes from a third group: dilettantes — those who think they know more than they do. I doubt there will ever be enough top-notch contributors to fix the work of the others — and so while the model is amazingly good in many respects, I would dispute the idea that it is perfect.

The second shortcoming is concision. Online, with no physical space constraints, entries can expand indefinitely. Take that, and add to it that peer-production tends to be cumulative, and the result is there is a tendency for things to grow, but little editing function to condense it into a more useful form. There is a great value not just in completeness but being concise — maps are drawn at scale rather than actual size for a reason.

The final shortcoming is in genius, or intellectual innovation. It is not clear that truly inventive or radically creative ideas can emerge. Peer-production’s central strength is that it is democratic, and its weakness is that it is, well, democratic. We even see some of the same problems we see in any democratic system: the loudest critic often wins and the best people are often pushed out by the mediocre. No one would hold out committees as the ideal form for intellectual innovation to take place — so I would pose the question whether peer-production will necessarily do better than other models, including classic proprietary models, in the area of radically innovative ideas.”

Cukier also discusses Cukier, seems to be in favor of DRM, and thinks aloud about possible business models.

To monitor the latter, we have started a new page in our Wiki, monitoring Open Music Business Models.