At the Syndicate Conference Seth Goldstein and Steve Gilmore were on screen talking about Attention Trust (via Isight). Seth started talking about how delicious sold for x-million dollars and that meant that Yahoo paid them between $30 and $100 for a persons links in the system. Seth said that as users start of figure out the equity of their attention they invest in systems that they will demand new models of equity (read $/resources) emerging. Lots of folks in the crowd really could not follow what he was saying or get it. This article makes it really clear. Who owns the wisdom of the crowd? The Crowd.
There was much discussion about the point at which things do get screwed up: Somebody grows by being open. Then they want to stay on top so they exert control (getting greedy about trying to keep you in or about money or information). When they exert too much control, then competitors can gang up by being more open (regaining the advantage that made the big guy big) or the public the big guy serves can desert.
All of which is to say that there are values that must be shared to succeed. But we’re still not sure what those values are; we’re still scribbling down Hammurabi’s Code. Once again, we are building a new society here.
I believe we start with the notions that:
* We all want to control our contributions.
* We all want the community to benefit if we in turn benefit.
* We expect mutual trust in the forms of transparency and honesty
* And we all — individual, collective, enabler — find uncivil behavior (spam, fraud, hate) unacceptable.
But there’s one more fundamental notion that informs this new society, a notion that big companies and institutions invariably forget because they were build in the old order:
This is no longer a centralized world, a world controlled by those institutions. This is a decentralized world, a world controlled by us.
And if you try to take control away from us, you will lose. It used to be that you could take control away from us and we had nowhere to go. But in this post-scarcity world, we can always go somewhere else for content or information or service. There’s always another news story, always another email service, always another search engine. Thus my first law, once again: Give us control and we will use it. Don’t and you will lose us.