A few days ago I wrote a post and linked to an Aspen Institute report titled The Rise of Collective Intelligence – Decentralized Co-Creation of Value as a New Paradigm of Commerce and Culture.
Today I’d like to offer readers an example of new tools and web services operating in social networks that in my opinion make the concepts and observations in the report come alive. The example involves people using search, content, collaboration and sharing, which are all central elements of the ecosystems of commerce and culture in which we will all be living, working and consuming.
There’s a small company up here in Vancouver, British Columbia (the warm and beautiful part of the Great White North of North America) that develops social networking platforms and customized elearning solutions. The Donat Group is also creating a social music initiative (Project Opus), a part of which involves Mixxmaker, a web service that helps music lovers build playlists collaboratively. Building playlists collaboratively creates a "Social Object", offering people a means of co-creating value around music they like and want to share with others they know.
We all know that the music industry is in real turmoil, and is searching frantically for new business logic and new business models. The major participants have all been under pressure from free downloads, and the price of music is under pressure as never before. Where will additional value, and eventually revenue, come from ?
David Gratton is the founder of the Donat Group, Project Opus and Mixxmaker. David recently wrote a post about why the digital packaging around music, especially as a social object, can and will be of value. Mainly, being able to search for, locate, aggregate and acquire various elements about a song or an artist that someone likes will help create meaning and in turn value.
He also wrote about ‘who’ is involved in the co-creation of this new form of value … or in other words how the market for value associated with songs is being broken up and then co-created anew. Doing this around a playlist that is built in collaboration with others also helps mightily in creating connections and trust, and lays a foundation for putting the dynamics of word-of-mouth marketing into dynamic operation.
It’s important to note here that David and his colleagues at Project Opus and Mixxmaker put a lot of work into staying within the bounds of Fair Use, an all-important consideration when exploring new paradigms for creating (or co-creating in this case) potentially new economic value.
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Once people start building today’s equivalent of albums together with their friends, the changes to the ways music is distributed and acquired will continue to diversify away from purchasing CDs, as David has noted. But people will still want that unusual album cover from the old vinyl days, or the most recent YouTube video clip of a given band’s performance, or a series of photos from Flickr (carrying the appropriate Creative Commons license, to be sure) to add to their own personal collection of digital artefacts about that kind of music, that band, that group of friends .. and so on.
It’s a pity, really, that this fun and easy-to-use capability exists only as a Facebook application at the moment. I seem to be observing a rapidly-growing trend of people turning down invitations to add another Facebook application to their Facebook profile (I am one of those people). While supposedly Mark Zuckerberg is aware of the growing dissatisfaction .. and you’d think the Beacon fiasco was notice enough … it’s hard to shake the sense that Facebook and its partner applications are all really just looking for ways to maximize page views and ad impression.
That, for me, does not fall into the category of decentralized co-creation of value, no matter how you spin it.
But .. I suspect that in the coming months and years we’ll see many more examples of applications and services like Mixxmaker that let and / or help people co-create online things that they care about and enjoy.
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Tags: Aspen Institute, Decentralized Co-creation of Value, Donat Group, Project Opus, Mixxmaker, Facebook
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