Economy of abundance

David Hornick just wrote a post that turns the Long Tail into a new economy: Chris Anderson Strikes Again: The Economy of Abundance. several of the smartest VCs I am reading (actually 4 out of 9 VCs) are wondering directly or indirectly about abundance.

Last week, I wrote a post, after reading Equity Quicker, about a "Google size problem" that is not yet dealt with. I splited my argumentation in 4 parts. The first one was about Content and was, without using the term, describing an Economy of abundance.

"Content:  Long Tail + Dematerialization = Pandora Box of Content = Content like water" = Abundance

Ross Mayfield wrote a sequel using the dichotomy : Scarcity/Abundance and quotes a post from Jerry Michalski's talking with Sirf (from technorati) saying that scarcity is the only way to create value.  And digging my abundance delicious tag i found these two lines from aVC, that should settle this debate:

"In the physical world scarcity is what leads to value.
In the digital world abundance is what leads to value."

If you have doubts, just think about Metcalfe or Reed but switch Computers for Humans and critical mass with interactions.

Nevertheless I disagree with R.Mayfield on one point: "scarcity of attention is false", but maybe it's because he speaks about production quoting Abundance economics [Flemming Funch,1994] and not about consumption.

"Across consumer markets, attention is becoming the scarcest - and so most strategically vital - resource in the value chain. Attention scarcity is fundamentally reshaping the economics of most industries it touches; beginning with the media industry."
The attention Economy (it's the first post I tagged using the abundance term, because to discover a new problem/need one needs to nail a new environement).

The line I wrote in my previous post ended with this : "= Hyperchoice problem. What you need is a filter (either active or passive) and  that's a huge market."

So now let's ride the vibe.... D.Hornick said "Like the Long Tail before it, I suspect that I will be seeing the Economy of Abundance permeate the presentations that I see in the coming months and year." We are happy that these ideas permeate our pitch some time ago (and we considered at that time that we were laging the P2P environment) when we first drafted it because we really believe on the attention/scarcity problem/need (it's the other face of the abudance coin).

If you want to follow that track let me offer you a delicious kind of meal :

• Venture with Wit. With the four points and some examples and quotes.
• The first post from longTAil on the subject (at least I think) and it's in March 2005 !!
  
• Attention Network by Apophenia
• The first two post of david Hornick back in 12/05: Where's the money in the Long Tail? & Social Networks 3.0 (These two posts are the reason why it went directly in my RSS reader.)
• Disruptive Thoughts on Crowds aren't wise (it's indirectly related to the topics but that guy kicks ass with disruption and quotes condorcet ;-))
• Attention and entrepreunership from Avc / Grinda and Hypomanics
• I have a lot more in the pipe but I need to turn my starred RSS from Google reader to delicous.... and it will take time.

Comments

[Rédigé par : leafar]

Chris Anderson vient de publier un article sur le sujet sur son blog. Il y a un jeu de slide à télécharger. Allez y faire un tour.

[Rédigé par : olivier2point0]

Tiens moi aussi (mais sans slide) ;-)

Pour prolonger la réflexion, sur les économies d'abondance et la création de richesses, je vous propose de lire en entier l'excellent "La Fin du travail" de Jérémy Rifkin (dont je n'ai lu que la synthèse dans un "100 Fiches" ;-)
- http://www.cnam.fr/lipsor/dso/articles/fiche/rifkin.html
- http://www.cnam.fr/lipsor/dso/articles/fiche/rifkin.html

D'où, 2 questions :
1) se dirige-t-on vers une civilisation de l'activité-loisir et non plus du travail-labeur ?
2) qd est-ce que Typepad va permettre de mettre du code HTML dans ses commentaires pour éviter d'avoir des copier/coller de liens tout moches ?

[Rédigé par : leafar]

Pour la première question... cela mérite un post.
Pour le html c'est possible c'est les bloggeurs html friendly ce qui est mon cas.
Voir mes réponses à Nic Brisbourne ici

[Rédigé par : el rude]

Un autre excellent bouquin de Rifkin est "The Age of Access" où Rifkin expose sa théorie du passage d'un capitalisme de marché à un capitalisme de réseau...