A couple of months ago Wikinomics co-blogger Lawrence Chen wrote about Riffworks, an online recording application that allows guitar players around the world to compose music in a collaborative fashion. I recently had an opportunity to chat with Riffworks co-founder, Doug Wright, about Apple II classics, midi keyboards, and notator programs and how much the world of digital recording has evolved since then. Doug had a lot of insightful things says, but I found the [...]

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So I’m on my way to Biltmore in Arizona explaining to my driver what I do for a living. I’m trying to describe Wikinomics in the simplest of terms when he interrupts me, pausing briefly to flash a wry smile. “Say no more,” he says, “I know exactly what you’re talking about.” He explains that his daughter is on the Internet all day long answering questions on ChaCha and making about $100 a day. I [...]

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  Earlier in the week I posted Manny Wilson’s creative depiction of the merits of wiki collaboration. I noted then how a participant at a recent talk I gave at Nokia had pointed out that the happy faces on the left of Manny’s diagram probably ought to be frowning. Chris then alerted me to an updated version of the diagram that reflects the personal and organizational pain that email so often inflicts (click on the thumbnail!)   [...]

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They say a picture is worth a thousand words and I think this one sums up the power of wiki collaboration better than any 1,000 word essay ever could (Click here for a better view). The model was developed by Manny Wilson of U.S. Central Command and was shared with me by Chris Rasmussen at US National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. I presented this slide during a talk I gave at Nokia today and someone pointed out that the happy [...]

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I caught the BBC’s article on email overload this morning. The article points out that two million e-mails are sent every minute in the UK. That is almost three billion each day. But what is the real cost of this information overload, they ask? Apparently one UK-based firm estimated that dealing with pointless e-mails cost it £39m a year. Everyone knows it’s a problem. Everyone hates trying to filter through hundreds of emails a day. [...]

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Wikinomics was published with 11 chapters, but only the first ten chapters had been written. Chapter 11 – the Wikinomics Playbook – was a blank slate with an open invitation for the world to help us write a suiting conclusion on wikinomics.com. Over the course of 2007 something remarkable happened. A community of readers and experts formed and took on a life of its own. Thanks to a great deal of diligent “wiki gardening,” the [...]

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It’s the first I’ve heard of a dissertation being written on mass collaboration, although I suspect there are many more out there. I have yet to read it in full, although I did note that our friend Howard Rheingold is one of the examiners. The author, Mark Elliot, points out that while Don and I were the first to write about mass collaboration, our book wouldn’t make it through a PhD examination process due to [...]

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My Wikinomics co-author Don Tapscott has an interesting post on Wiki cities over on wikinomics.com. He discusses the “Wiki City Rome” initiative, a project led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that uses data from cellphones and other wireless technology to illustrate the city’s pulse in real time. The project features a giant on-screen display in one of Rome’s main centers that will display a live map of the city. Don says “anyone with an [...]

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British psychologist Will Reader presented research today suggesting that social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace do not help users make genuinely close friends. Users may amass hundreds or even thousands of acquaintances, however Reader claims that face to face contact is nearly always necessary to form truly close friendships. The research, based on a survey of 200 social network users, appears to support previous theories that a typical friendship group consists of around 150 [...]

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Every year Ofcom, the British communications regulator, releases a snapshot of the UK media landscape. This year’s report contains a vast treasure trove of data and analysis on everything from media consumption to device usage to spending on online advertising to trends in user-generated media. There’s more than enough to keep media geeks and business analysts occupied for days on end. With so much on offer in this 337 page report it’s hard to decide [...]

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