Age of Peer Production I found this intriguing, especially after attending Thursday night's bloggers' meet, and Mike Sechrist's overview with Nashville bloggers. From Wired.

First, steam power replaced muscle power and launched the Industrial Revolution. Then Henry Ford’s assembly line, along with advances in steel and plastic, ushered in the Second Industrial Revolution. Next came silicon and the Information Age. Each era was fueled by a faster, cheaper, and more widely available method of production that kicked efficiency to the next level and transformed the world. Now we have armies of amateurs, happy to work for free. Call it the Age of Peer Production. From Amazon.com to MySpace to craigslist, the most successful Web companies are building business models based on user-generated content. This is perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of the second-generation Web. The tools of production, from blogging to video-sharing, are fully democratized, and the engine for growth is the spare cycles, talent, and capacity of regular folks, who are, in aggregate, creating a distributed labor force of unprecedented scale.

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But the real miracle is in the more intentional work millions of us do to populate the Web: 80 million MySpace pages, 40 million bloggers, nearly a million amateur encyclopedians. The result is a shared culture of fandom, commentary, and camaraderie. And then there’s open source software, which has changed both the corporate server (Linux) and the consumer desktop (Firefox) – and given new life to IBM, a company that now thrives by building software and services atop peer-produced code.

Previous industrial ages were built on the backs of individuals, too, but in those days labor was just that: labor. Workers were paid for their time, whether on a factory floor or in a cubicle. Today’s peer-production machine runs in a mostly nonmonetary economy. The currency is reputation, expression, karma, “wuffie,” or simply whim.

This can all sound a little like, well, ’60s-style utopianism. I keep telling the people who work for me there is a lot going on. The Operating Manager of the paper and I watch this diligentally. So, err ... what's next.  ¶ 7/08/2006 01:48:00 PM