Democratizing the Creation of Value

I’ve borrowed the title of this post from the Wikinomics site which describes how new communication technologies are reshaping the way the world does business by allowing the distributed voices of the rank and file to collaborate online.

Over the last decade some of the enormous untapped potential of the web has been realized as tools such as instant messaging have been complimented by blogs, wikis, and social networking platforms such as Facebook and MySpace. Rich media creation, presentation and distribution has also become accessible to the masses with the advent of cheap webcams, point and shoot digital cameras, and free software like Jing and Photoshop Express delivering media to sites like YouTube, Flickr and Screencast.com. And who would of thought even five years ago that behind the firewall corporate productivity suites would be threatened by the emergence of the web office space, but tools like Buzzword, Google Docs and SlideRocket are turning that once staid world inside out.

None of this is breaking news. Jeremy Alliare described the convergent technologies enabling and shaping this revolution early on and Tim O’Reilly set the tech world afire with his Web 2.0 description of the ‘new’ web. However, I think Wikinomics correctly hits on the core ramification–value is no longer locked up behind the firewall or in the boardroom. Content creation and distribution have become exceedingly easy (no longer confined to the geek class) allowing online collaboration to become richer and richer and thus more and more valuable. Look out, for better or worse, the genie is out of the bottle and is turning much of the business and social world as we know it on its head.

Props to my boy Aaron Silvers for turning me on to Wikinomics.