leafar

Lessig for congress

Laurence Lessig may run for congress.
After creating the CC he is now addressing corruption issue.
I love the web a bit more everyday ... and this kind of event are reason for it.
We are now designing culture and society !

Netocracy is not about money ;-D

Fiske's grammatical approach of economy

Feld points to an interesting article in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Fiske, a professor of anthropology at UCLA who previously taught at Penn and Bryn Mawr, has devoted decades of research to disentangling human relationships. He's studied communities all over the world, comparing cultures in West Africa with those in Europe and America. His conclusion: Just as every human language is composed of the same grammatical elements (subjects, verbs, etc.), all relationships are built from exactly four kinds of interactions. Fiske labels these communal sharing, equality matching, authority ranking and market pricing. Here's what he means:

• Communal sharing is how you treat your immediate family: All for one and one for all. Or as Marx put it: From each according to ability, to each according to need.
• Equality matching, by contrast, means we all take turns. From kindergarten to the town meeting, it's all about fair shares, reciprocity, doing your part.
• Authority ranking is how tribes function, not to mention armies, corporations and governments. Know your place, obey orders, and hail to the chief.
• Market pricing, of course, is the basis of economics. It's what we do whenever we weigh costs and benefits, trade up (or down), save or invest.

Don't get Fiske wrong: He's not saying that each relationship in your life fits into one of these four slots. Rather, these are paradigms - mental models - that we use to help make sense of our interactions. When there are conflicts, moreover, Fiske maintains it's often because we aren't all using the same model.

--> very interesting for social web!

Feld will dig the subject because he is not sure if it's fully relevant. I have a good intuition that it is !
raising money with Vc is a combination of Authority & Market. raising money with Angels is a combination of Communal & Market. Fun? I will read Fiske's full article and try to bring some inputs.
But I see a smart use of Marx which I think get the economics pretty straight.... These ideas can be integrated in environement (in need to think about terms .... but Infra/Super structures are a good start ;-)). We see a number of new way to ease understandings of economics .... and they're all about micro-economy, i.e how the homo economicus is walking under the invisble hand.

Est maitre des lieux celui qui les organise

Je suis tombé sur un affiche de renovation du métro qui datait de 1995, avec ce slogan.
Probablement déterrée par d'autres travaux de rénovation et illustrée avec un lion.... j'ai tout de suite pensé aux illustration de Gustave Doré pour les Fables de la Fontaine. Impossible de trouver la source de cette phrase. Je pense cependant que ce slogan n'est plus possible aujourd'hui (politiquement pas correct, mais finalement très français). En creusant je suis tombé sur cette fable magnifique ou La Fontaine rend hommage à son maître Esope :

LE PÂTRE ET LE LION
Les fables ne sont pas ce qu'elles semblent être ;
Le plus simple animal nous y tient lieu de maître.
Une morale nue apporte de l'ennui :
Le conte fait passer le précepte avec lui.
En ces sortes de feinte il faut instruire et plaire,
Et conter pour conter me semble peu d'affaire.
C'est par cette raison qu'égayant leur esprit,
Nombre de gens fameux en ce genre ont écrit.
Tous ont fui l'ornement et le trop d'étendue.
On ne voit point chez eux de parole perdue.
Phèdre était si succinct qu'aucuns l'en ont blâmé ;
Ésope en moins de mots s'est encore exprimé.
ais sur tous certain Grec renchérit et se pique
D'une élégance laconique ;
Il renferme toujours son conte en quatre vers :
Bien ou mal, je le laisse à juger aux experts.

Wikipedia: retrouvez les fables en wikisources.

Google Book : Les fables chez la renaissance (un ouvrage simple et élégant malheureusement il manque les illustrations)

Source Image: Artsy Craftsy

Autre: cette phrase est associée à un livre sur l'Europe (étonnant)

Intelligence Amplification or the TAR problem

Brad Feld has made several posts on a subject that where indirectly treated in my Venture with Wit post. The TAR problem is the following :

1. Trust
2. Attention
3. Relevance

Brad has invested in several companies trying to solve this tryptic (such as Me.dium, Lijit, Collective Intellect, and HiveLive) I am currently trying Lijiit (great!) and became a reader of its CTO blog (who loves the same comics as I do) and is quite insightfull. They all tried to get a name for the solution in a ping pong post serie, and they came with  : Intelligence Amplification.

Ryan (Brad Partner @ Moebius Venture) explains how he came with the term and where it comes from.

I think this term applies very well to what is enabled when you combine elements of social networking, open-source knowledge (I rely heavily on Wikipedia for links in many of my blog posts), trusted relationships, folksonomy/tagging (see the wisdom-of-crowds at work with Flickr, Del.icio.us, Technorati, Digg, etc), collaborative filters, search engines and other tools that use the internet to coordinate human-to-human sharing of knowledge and information. These tools use algorithms to leverage human activities and human minds belonging to millions of strangers, and, increasingly friends and acquaintances, to help us find relevance in the flood of information we are trying to stay afloat in.

I like this term and I think it's quite interesting because I agree with the gang about web 3.0: semantic web is EPIC and not for tomorrow. So we have to put Human Computation to reach such objectives as thoses of the semantic web.  It could be Collaborative Filtering or anotation .... but Human is key to create smart links and paths of dicovery or knowledge.

I love ping pong (unfortunately none of them has trackback) and it seems that we will have over the next few weeks the smart discussion I was hopping for in my previous post.

Intermediation is king .... or why I love november 2006

Source : GenuineVc "The Royal Throne in the Entertainment Business – Don’t Kill the Messenger"

 

Analyst Spencer Wang of Bear Stearns just published a very good overview of the dynamics of the entertainment industry which argues that “aggregation & context and not content are king.” There isn’t anything entirely ground-breaking in the report, but it’s a great overview synopsis of a lot of the trends occurring in the industry. (You can download the presentation here)

Nicholas Carr summaries the report well, “Wang argues that both ends of the value chain - content creation and content distribution - are increasingly characterized by oversupply and hence weak profitability. Value, as a result, is migrating to the center of the value chain, where content aggregation and branding take place. The profit, in other words, is in packaging.”

[Leafar: And we are in an era of personalized packaging, think about creating your nike, writing text on the back of your ipod .... etc / People are gonna ask for a personnalized packaging that fit their identity]

I largely agree with Wang’s conclusions – that “new competitors… [of] viable aggregators [are going] to emerge” and that “startups are likely to be more nimble [than incumbent creators of content],” However, I’d like to add that messaging with others, and the intersection of that activity with content creation is a large piece in the puzzle. Yes, the profit is in the packaging of entertainment, but also in the packaging of messages as well.

Digging blog is efficient when done by the writer : found in a previous note from GenuineVc
Connectivity over content – or being content?  I haven’t been able to shake the theme from the (long and somewhat dated academic) article written by Andrew Odlyzko, “Content is Not King,” which has stuck with me since I read it last September.  Maintaining “that connectivity is more important than content,”

November 2006 will get a Hall of Fame, it's a 24 months of work that come under the spolights over the last 3 weeks. Leweb3 is gonna be awesome, speaking with smart people about what we have been thinking about probably for almost 5 years ... and working over for the last 2. Great discussions mean good inputs & outputs.

From Freemium to Freeconomics

In march Avc introduced the freemium model. Yesterday Chris Anderson turned his economy of abundance to the freeconomics in reference to the book of Levitt.

We need to put more thinking in the model to make it work, think about side effect, free ride, incentive (for UGC for example) ... That's what economy is about. Building it will be very fun. Hope I will get sometimes to spend on it.

The paradox of Abundance

Nicholas Carr has just write a brilliant post on the paradox of the abundance economy.
I wrote something a while ago just after David Hornick post.
Here is an extract of his post showing how free is costly :

In arguing that computing is "almost free," while at the same time describing how costly it actually is, Gilder overlooks the paradox of abundance: that providing a resource in the quantities required to make it seem "free" can be a very expensive undertaking

For me the perfect example is Youtube with its free video and its bandwith needs.
The paradox can be largely expanded to the personal human computation problem (close to  the attention one) but Environement is also a briliant example.

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

Une analyse sociale de l'acquisition de Youtube par Google.

Je sais j'arrive après la bataille.... mais un très bon article vient d'etre publié par F.Stutzman sur la composante sociale de Youtube. Cet article orienté autour de la long tail et du social est percutant , en voici quelques extraits :

"As we fill out a social network profile, or post pictures on Flickr, we are illustrating our identity and creating content for others. When we use social applications to create a representation of our identity, we are doing it for our social networks - people we want to impress and entertain.
[Apres mon puzzle je ne peux pas être plus d'accord]

However, this required non-traditional thinking. This required us to stop thinking about video as a one-to-many (and very many at that) and start thinking of video as one-to-one or one-to-very few. Just as the average blog post has an audience of a just a few people, the average video posted to YouTube is just for a few people. And just as that average blog post is quite valuable to that small audience, that average YouTube video is extremely valuable to its small audience. The long-tail scale-free economics that support the blogosphere (and its A-list) are precisely at play in YouTube, creating an invaluable ecosystem.

YouTube, and most social sites, are about conversation. It is the conversation between users that drives the creation of content, and the network effects that make the network extremely valuable."

Mais lisez l'article il vaut le coup.

La fin de la télévision

« En quelques années, nous sommes passés d’une télévision de pénurie à et de masse à une télévision d’abondance et de niches. C’est une évolution logique, que la presse écrite et la radio ont connue, elles aussi. […] tout au long de cette transformation, le téléspectateur, lui aussi a changé […]. Là est le cœur de la révolution […] la nature de la relation du téléspectateur à ses programmes. »

Jean-Louis Missika ouvre donc son livre par sa thèse qu’il décide de replacer dans son histoire (Chap.I) viendront ensuite : la disparition de la télévision (Chap.II) -caractérisée par trois évolutions qui constituent les sous segments : la démédiation, la dépendance, la déprofessionnalisation- et la désintégration de l’espace public (Chap.III) avec une analyse historique et bien illustrée du fait JT, de l’événement médialisé (le jeu de mots est volontaire) et enfin le débat désynchronisé. Cette analyse est simple, éclairante et cathodique… elle donne à réfléchir l’internet et le nouvel âge des média. Définitivement un Hall Of Fame de l’année.