Frankfurt.


The Prosumer Revisited conference begins with a keynote by Frank Piller, who presents the perspective from management research. He begins by describing the story of the ice cream king of upper Manhattan - a small old-fashioned store which sells only a small range of flavours and does not mix them. This is the old market model - where the quality of products means that producers have no need to respond to the needs and interests of consumers. But we've moved away from this, as Chris Anderson's 'long tail' model shows - while such old-fashioned marketing models focussed on extracting profits from the short head of the long tail distribution, stores like Amazon have emerged to cater to the long tail, offering a vast variety of products but selling only a relatively small quantity of each title. What Amazon has managed is to build a sustainable business model from this.

Frankfurt.


I've arrived at the Prosumer Revisited conference in Frankfurt, where we've gathered in the very stylish main hall of the Johann-Wolfgang-von-Goethe-Universität. We begin with a welcome by conference chair Birgit Blättel-Mink, and a representative from conference sponsor eBay, who notes the site's own contribution to prosumption culture (and describes what eBay generated more specifically as an 'auction culture', from which the site is slowly moving on, however - a culture of buying and reselling goods relatively rapidly, of a transient ownership which I've also touched on in the final chapter of my produsage book).

Athens.


From here we move on to Panayotis Pantos as the final WebSci '09 speaker on online politics. He begins by posing the fundamental question 'what is politics'? Do we understand by the term only elections and campaign, political parties, unions and other political organisations, and lobby groups, or is politics the process by which groups make collective decisions?

Online communication addresses the tensions between private and collective, participation and mediation, and physical distance and the increase of communication - we are no longer merely receivers, but also producers of information; our existence online abolishes some long-held understandings of how the communicatory and political process is supposed to work (but of course it does not eradicate all differences or enables all of us to participate in the same way).