Blogs

Hamburg.
The next speaker this morning at next09 is Lee Bryant from Headshift, whose interest is in user-driven companies. Such companies may engage in user-led product design or user-led innovation, for example, and much of their approach draws on the experience of the open source movement. But can we think beyond the 'user involvement' model, where user innovation takes place only on the surface? Examples for existing models, Lee suggests, include Digg as a totally user-driven environment, Dell's Ideastorm which draws in user ideas, and Walkers Chips' exercise in crowdsourcing new potato chips flavours - but even those remain to a large extent on the surface, and is not likely to be enough.

Hamburg.
We're now starting the second and last day of the next09 conference here in Hamburg - and we begin with a speech by Brian Solis from Futureworks. His theme is what he calls 'the human network': the social and cultural networking which is enabled and supported by social media technologies (but is so much more than just the technology itself). For Brian, the share economy (which gives this conference its title) is the social economy - an economy in which conversations represent social currency, in which we earn social capital and influence rather than simply monetary value.

Hamburg.
Day one at next09 ends with a humorous review of tweets on Twitter, by the team from TwitKrit, a German blog offering 'literary criticism' of Twitter posts. Those of you who are so inclined will know how to find #next09 comments on Twitter - or otherwise, pop in to the next09 community at SixGroups.

(Speaking seriously for a moment, though - a conference presentation compiled from random Twitter users' outstanding tweets raises some very interesting questions about the boundaries between public and private. Discuss.)

Hamburg.
The final keynote on this first day of next09 is by Matthias Schrader of next09 conference organisers Sinnerschrader, who brings us back to the conference theme 'share economy'. What can we share, what do we want to share, what do we get out of sharing?

In the share economy, what we share are in the first place the tools we use; using (physical, mechanical) tools, of course, has long been seen as a uniquely human trait (although that belief has now been shown to be mistaken - other animals use tools, too). Perhaps the next step from here is the belief that only humans use tools to create other tools - that is, that only humans innovate by combining small, modular, commodity tools into more complex, composite, cutting-edge 'meta-tools'.

Hamburg.
From Andrew Keen's rant we move on to a next09 panel on mobile telephony. What will the mobile environment look like in 2020? We begin with a brief video from the open think tank MoCom2020.com, showing where we've come from, and where we may be going (a 'sensorconomy' based on digital device sensors, new mobile services and mobile broadband offerings, major takeup in India, Africa, and other developing regions, miniaturisation and embedding of mobile devices, a shift of newspapers from print to mobile delivery, instant translation tools, location tracking, and substantial privacy and security concerns).

Hamburg.
After the coffee break at next09 we're moving on to Andrew Keen, who's made something of a name for himself as a vocal critic of Web 2.0. He begins by responding to the previous two keynote speakers, and agrees with the idea that we're facing profound institutional change, but suggests that their analysis of wher we've come from is skewed. Industrial capitalism 1.0 created masses, created the industrial class, he says, and led to the development of strong hierarchical institutions; this system is now in demise.

Hamburg.
The next keynote speaker at next09 is Umair Haque from Havas Media Lab, who continues the theme by exploring what 'capitalism 2.0' might look like - his suggestion is that we're moving towards a new form of 'constructive capitalism', and that we need a capitalism where the costs of creative destruction are minimised, and the benefits maximised.

Today, the global growth in GDP has slowed drastically; there is a kind of 'zombieconomy' of old companies with obsolete business models which no longer manages to create value, but used to be core drivers of GDP. What this means is that corporate strategy as we know it is obsolete; instead, interaction between people is exploding, and this sits immediately at odds with the 'market are there to be dominated' approach of conventional industry.

Hamburg.
I've arrived in beautiful Hamburg, where I'll spend the next six weeks as a fellow of the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation for Communications Research and a visiting scholar at the Hans-Bredow-Institut for Media Research. The major event of these first few days here, though, is the next09 conference - a major conference for the German and European media industry which has drawn some 1300 delegates and operates this year under the title "Share Economy". I'm speaking tomorrow, on "Produsage and Business" (presenting some of the outcomes from my work in the Smart Services CRC). Should be fun, and it's held in a brilliant venue, the converted factory space Kampnagel (which reminds be a little of Toronto's Koolhaus). Videos from all of the presentations will be online soon, too!

It must be reporting season - in addition to the major "Social Media: State of the Art" report which we'll soon publish through the Smart Services CRC, two final reports from (what used to be called) Carrick Institute teaching and learning projects which I was involved in during 2007 and 2008 have been released recently. (The Carrick Institute has since been renamed the Australian Learning and Teaching Council.) I really can't take much credit here, though - my gradual and continuing transition to a very research-heavy workload has meant that my teaching activities have increasingly had to take a back seat. So, congratulations should go to:

(Crossposted from produsage.org.)

I'm briefly back in Brisbane before heading back to Europe for the next round of conferences and a good month as a visiting scholar and Alcatel-Lucent Fellow at the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg. My time here at home has given me an opportunity to reflect on the conferences I attended on the last trip: WebSci '09 in Athens and Prosumer Revisited in Frankfurt.

Prosumer Revisited in particular, which I blogged about here, was an interesting experience - probably my first opportunity to reconnect in detail with the work being done in the overall area of produsage (and some way beyond it) in German academic research. A number of the keynotes at the conference were excellent, and it'll be interesting to follow some of the trajectories they explored.