Palimpsest: TOC: Tim O'Reilly/Publishing 2.0

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TOC: Tim O'Reilly/Publishing 2.0

Tuesday, June 19, 2007 — posted by Sarah

What do killer Internet applications have in common?

Information businesses (publishers??)
Software as a service
Internet as platform
Harnessing collective intelligence

Web 2.0: harness network effects to get better the more people use them.

Google: every time someone makes a web link, they contribute
eBay: critical mass of buyers and sellers hard for others to enter
amazon: 10M user reviews
craigslist: self-service classified ads, users do all the work
YouTube: viral distribution, user creation, user curation

Each of these companies is building a database whose values grows in proportion to the number of participants -- a network-effective-driven data lock-in. (gulp)

Law of conversation of attractive profits

When attractive profits disappear at one stage the opportunity will usually emerge at an adjacent stage.
PCs used to be expensive. Software became expensive. Free precursor to rediscovery of value in some other form.

And thus, if digital content is becoming cheap, what's next? What's adjacent?

For publishers, the question is: where is value migrating to?

Asymmetric competition

craigslist has 18 employees, #7 site on the web (2005 numbers)
All others in top 10 have thousands of employees.

Curating user-generated content

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think. -- Edwin Schlossberg
The skill of programming is to create a context in which other people can share.

Collaborative authoring