Closing Session. Reflection #8

This week’s class provided good volume of information for thoughts and was insightful. The topics we were discussing contained three ones I was extremely interested in.

1. I don’t know if there is something that couldn’t be done by the collaborative efforts. No doubts, people’s willingness to collaborate driven solely by non-financial motivations is a truly amazing phenomenon, enabled by informational technologies. I’m not surprised that there are a lot of authors who writes about this. Our in-class discussion of books I haven’t read made me think about reading Wikinomics and Wisdom Of The Crowds.

2. Our conversation about the way copyrights work for Wikipedia inspired me to think about the real impact copyrights might have. I can’t stop wondering if Wikipedia could recruit volunteer lawyers to settle a copyrights infringement case? Probably yes. Interesting, how would it change Wikipedia’s image in the eyes of its users? Would contributors feel their input is secured? Would it damage Wikipedia’s image of free and available to everybody encyclopedia?

All the surveys show that people are willing to contribute due to altruistic intentions. What’s the purpose of copyrights in this case? Human clock http://www.humanclock.com/ is another great example of copyrights useless. People are willing to give their rights away, just because they want to contribute.

3. Our in-class conversation about the importance of online reputation made me think about the real value of reviews and comments we did during the quarter. I had an issue with that, because it was really hard to find the ties between net-centric economics and writing reviews. I took it easy, because it’s always good to practice in writing. After Mark’s speech, I realized an importance of the ability to write good and substantial reviews for building an online reputation today. I think I’ll expand on that in my final paper.

Social revolution. What’s, how’s and why’s.

The way people behave themselves in Internet clearly illustrates that they are willing to collaborate, even driven by non-financial motivations only. What impact on the economy could it have, if any?

People are natively good at working in groups. The lowering of transaction costs as the main amplifier of group communications not only helps people act together but also makes them realize the power they have. Would it lead to unlimited and unreasonable attempts to “change the World” by smaller groups of people?

Nowadays, a single person with a laptop or a cell phone can spark huge movement (like the one for Airlines Passengers’ Bill of Rights) that can go far beyond the most optimistic expectations. Who would take the responsibility if something goes wrong?

Social Revolution. Here Comes Everybody

In Here comes everybody, one of the most interesting books about the latest changes in the way people behave online, Clay Shirky observes and deeply analyzes the social revolution. Anything that have happened it recent years in the field of technology, fundamentally changed the way people communicate and act.

Shirky wasn’t the person who proclaimed the social revolution. However, he is considered one of the finest thinkers on Internet revolution. In Here comes everybody Shirky explains that it used to take a lot of time and resources to gather people in groups and make them act. Nowadays, the lowest transaction costs ever allow people to share information and cooperate with no boundaries/restrictions. That’s one of the key messages the book delivers.

Motivations of Contributors to Wikipedia

The Motivations of Contributors to Wikipedia by Stacey Kuznetsov takes a sociological approach to explain which incentives drive people to contribute to the World’s largest collaboration project.

The empirical research she conducted illustrated:

• 48.89% of respondents indicated that the main reason they are willing to contribute to Wikipedia is to “educate humanity/raise awareness”
• 17.78% “feel like I’m making a difference”
• 15.56% “to give back to the Wikipedia community”
• Remaining participants selected selfish reasons such as the desire to “establish a credible online reputation for myself” or to “brag to my friends”.

Thus, Stacey draws the next conclusion:

“This data indicates that respondents are willing to contribute to Wikipedia because they want to share information, as well as to reciprocate to the Wikipedia community and acquire a sense of satisfaction from contributing”.

She also explains the values that underlie these motivations:

• Altruism
• Reciprocity
• Reputation
• Autonomy
• Community

Stacey points that willingness to contribute to Wikipedia correlates with respondents’ frequency of Wikipedia use. Less than 15% of respondents who rarely used Wikipedia (once or twice in their lives) indicated that they were willing to add information to an existing article or create new articles. However, as many as 50% of the weekly and daily users indicated that they were willing to add information and create articles.

As for me, this survey represents the behavior of the specific narrow group of respondents and cannot be considered as a general rule for all the audiences. According to Clay Shirky there is a huge imbalance of contributions-per-user to Wikipedia (Here comes everybody, p. 124-125). He claims that fewer than 2 percent of Wikipedia users ever contribute. The same power law distribution applied to modern economics by Chris Anderson works over here…

Looks like there is a contradiction between the article and Shirky’s book, especially at a first glance. However, most likely, there is just a huge distinction between the number of users claiming their willingness to contribute and the number of users doing the actual editing and creating articles.

Copyrights and anonymity. Reflection #7

The first thing I want to write about is Howard Rheingold’s (our guest speaker) talk about the digital identity of people going online. It sounds a little bit unrealistic but makes some sense. There are a lot of pros and cons here, so it’s really hard to decide whether it is necessary or not. I think it should be optional. If you want to gain some credibility in your online community – choose to use a digital identity. If not – don’t even bother yourself. For a number of years Internet have been the place where people could escape from their shame and embarrassment (I’m talking about positive projections of this phenomenon – like people talking anonymously about the health problems they wouldn’t talk otherwise). Anonymity is really important over here. It just cannot be taken away without harming these people.

Discussion questions

What are the main differences between mob and crowd mentalities?

Is there any breaking point where mob can lose the control over itself and become a crowd?

Is the mob just a bunch of people with a purpose but no common sense or forethought?

The Wealth of Networks.

The “Wealth of Networks” is the exceptional book by Yochai Benkler, Harvard Law professor and Co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Generally speaking, the book claims that information, knowledge, and culture are central to human freedom and human development. This approach makes it interesting to read, providing a fresh look on the relatively recent market transformations.

In his book Benkler makes an attempt to cover the topic of one of the most amazing human inventions – Internet. He focuses on the broad range of informational technologies’ impact on the society in general and on the economic and social aspects of the computer networks in particular. Benkler writes about how social production transforms markets and freedom, unveiling the topics of basic economics of information production and innovation, political, personal and cultural freedom.

Media Economics. Reflection #5

“Media economics: applying economics to new and traditional media” tries to set out the broad range of economic principles and concepts needed to understand media industries and issues. The media issues and applications addressed in the book are widely drawn from both new and traditional media. As for me, the most interesting chapter is the one about consumer behavior.

The overlook of a consumer behavior presented by the book is pretty brief but provides enough information on how consumer allocates a limited budget between an unlimited number of goods, and covers few laws describing customers’ behavior. However, the examples authors use to support their ideas are usually a little bit dated, which makes me doubt the relevancy of the ideas stated, for today’s fast changing economics. The good thing about this situation is that it usually takes some time for consumers’ behavior to get changed, thus I hope, the book provides relatively fresh look at the consumer behavior patterns. From the other side, I believe that the book’s approach to the media economics is a little bit obsolescent.

Nevertheless, the chapter presents an interesting analysis of individual customer behavior patterns. One of the best examples is a problem of foreign films. Authors make a good point on the habit-forming nature of the cultural goods, which is clearly illustrated by the increasing demand for foreign movies with the changes of the individual’s tastes after viewing the ones. Chris Anderson draws pretty much the same conclusion while making an attempt to describe the growing demand for less common goods in his book, “The Long Tail”. However, Anderson goes even further. He thinks that offering more variety does not shift demand by itself. Consumers must be given ways to find niches that suit their particular needs and interests. There is a need for filters that can drive demand down to more obscure goods.

Amazon insider’s confession :-)

Our guest speaker, Mike Culver, brought to discussion one of the most interesting topics we were talking about last Monday class. That was the cloud computing concept.

Mike also continued and expanded on the Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, an online crowdsourcing marketplace for HITs – human intelligence tasks. Last week’s guest speaker talked about it as well. However, since Mturk is one of the suites of Amazon Web Services, Mike was able to provide more details on this topic, giving really interesting examples of how this service is being used.

One of the examples was the collective search for a Steve Fossett’s plane using the latest Google satellite pictures. What is really amazing, thousands of people spend a lot of their personal time without even getting paid. That’s a real power of the networks.

Steve Fossett’s case made me think also about the transformation of journalism caused by the social media appearance once more. The fact that the plain was missing on September 3^rd and the press (CBC) covered the story only 8 days later, on September 11^th illustrated the shift of a power from professionals working for traditional media outlets to amateurs once again. Media aren’t mainstream anymore. They used to be the main source of news, covering newest stories and delivering the latest news. Nowadays, media, as it often happens, cover the topics that create a significant buzz online.

What I didn’t expect to learn from an Amazon insider was the information about TVmojo.com, one of the Amazon partners. TVmojo.com is using the annoying business model that was being used for selling obscure goods online few years ago (it might be in use even now – I’m not 100% sure). It looks like this: one web site is selling something pretty obscure for the high price (quite rare MP3s, exotic alcoholic beverages - whatever). They buy a lot of different domain names and create slightly different web sites with the similar content. Thus, they get all/most the positions on the first page of major search engines results in their category. If you decide to buy the product from any of these sites, you end up on the master’s web site they are pointing to. It’s not clear for me, what’s the Amazon’s point in doing that?

The long tail. Class two.

I really enjoyed T.A. McCann who was this week’s guest speaker. He brought up a couple topics I was particularly interested in. First of all, he covered the topic on what motivates people to participate by talking about both emotional and financial rewards. One of the examples he used to illustrate the architecture of participation was a HelpShare/Google maps mashup. It was really amazing to see how these IT questions and answers distribute all over the World. As for me, the fact of a lot of answers coming from Easter Europe endorses not just the fact that outsourced work is the long tail of information (according to McCann), but also talks about the long tail in human resources (that’s one more reason why Microsoft strongly advocates working visas for foreign workers).

One more thing, which was really amazing to me, was the McCann’s estimate on the average Internet niche saturation. Answering the question of a student, he mentioned that there are 5 main players and 50 small players in pretty much every niche (Wishpot is an example of one of the players in the field of Internet wish lists). One of the speakers at the last week’s Seattle Tech Startup event mentioned that ideas are cheap. Implementation is what really matters. It’s really easy and relatively cheap to copy any idea; that explains the significant number of players in each niche. However, only few make it to the top…

Discussing the suggested questions during the second part of the class was also an interesting exercise. Unfortunately, we didn’t have too much time for it, so some of the questions were left not completely answered.

IVSyd