Produsage Communities

Copenhagen.


The next speaker at COST298 is Brian Simpson, who also focusses on social networking, in this case in the context of the family. This relates especially to children's rights in cyberspace, to new parenting ideologies stressing surveillance and safety, and to the boundaries of childhood. Concern and overconcern regarding child safety have led to the development of new approaches to regulating family life through increased official guidance for parents - this may change what families are, in fundamental and unexpected ways. A related problem here is the overemphasis on child safety in relation to the Internet - and this also fails to consider its effect on family relationships through the externalisation of fantasies.

Copenhagen.


The final session at COST298 today starts with Romina Cachia, and she shifts our attention to social networking. How do such sites differ from other applications? They are built around the presentation of oneself, though a public display of information, and around this users socialise and form communities. Active users are thus integrated into the production process and into bottom-up activities. This reorganises Internet geography - and what's more, these sites are mostly free and easy to use, contrary to conventional homepages.

Copenhagen.


The next presentation at COST298 is by An Jacobs and Jo Pierson. Their interest is in the role of users in innovation - an increasingly prominent perception, but which 'user' are we talking about here, and where are they taking us? Their ability to innovate also depends on contextual factors, of course, some of which may not be entirely known to them.

In the digital environment, there are two key conceptions of innovation: innovation as dominated by technology, and disruptive (rather than incremental) innovation. Users themselves are placed along a continuum from everyday users to productive users to users who are even mainly producers (and there are also non-users, of course); innovation at the lower, everyday end can be described more from a dominant, incremental sociotechnological innovation perspective, while innovation at the production end is more often seen from a breakthrough technology innovation perspective. These forms of participation also spread across content creation, technological innovation, and more general forms of innovation.

Hamburg.


Only two more sessions to go at next09... The next one brings together a number of the major professional networking sites, with Kevin Eyres from LinkedIn, Stefan Groß-Selbeck from its German competitor Xing, and Markus Berger-de León from German student networking site StudiVZ (which has also launched a post-studies site, MeinVZ, and a site for schoolkids, SchülerVZ).

Stefan begins by stating that social networking has been the key development in online media over the past few years. In Germany, Xing is a leader of this development, especially in the professional networking context; its business network is moving through the current financial crisis very in a very stable fashion. The current crisis is an opportunity - and the company is confidently planning for its future. Kevin adds that for LinkedIn as a global platform the main challenge is to service the global business community. And he agrees that the crisis has raised the awareness of networking as a crucial element of professional life. By contrast, Markus describes StudiVZ with its strongly German focus as the most truly local networking site of the three. So far, the sites has not yet experienced any impact from the financial crisis - members are as active as they have been previously.

Hamburg.


The next next09 panel is with Jeremy Allaire from Brightcove and Axel Schmiegelow from Sevenload - online video hosting companies in the US and Germany. Brightcove licences its video platform to a variety of partners; it now operates online video for some hundreds of media companies. Increasingly, this is used for syndicating and distributing content through a variety of social media Websites. Sevenload, by contrast, brings together communities and the content they are interested in, significantly also including user-generated content. They monetise for the content providers by running advertising on the site. (And the two companies have just entered a commercial partnership.)

Hamburg.


We continue at next09 with a panel expanding on the question of brand-consumer relations in the social media age. Chris Heuer from the Social Media Club promotes a holistic, whole-of-business approach here - it's about more than marketing. Great products aren't sold, he says - they're bought; this has been the case for the iPhone, for example. The brand needs to convene the conversation around their products, and act like the host of the party - this means returning to basics, and letting go of the illusion of control.

Hamburg.


Unfortunately I had to miss the talk following mine at next09, by my host at the Hans-Bredow-Institut, Jan Schmidt - I had to do a couple of interviews with German media. So, I'm now in the post-lunch 'fireside chat' session with Jeff Jarvis and Umair Haque. We begin with a discussion of business models in a Googlified economy, and Jeff says that sharing your intellectual property always comes first here. In the end, you don't charge as much as the market can bear, but as little as you can bear.

Hamburg.


OK, I'm next at next09, speaking on produsage and business. Here's the presentation - audio to come as soon as I get a chance is already online, too...

Update: a video of my presentation is now also available through conference partner Sevenload.

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.


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.