Wikinomics
Popular books about economics and the ‘new paradigm’ offered by the web are coming thick and fast these days, and Wikinomics has proved a huge hit with people from the old economy trying to understand the new economy. You’re likely to find it on bookshelves (mine at any rate) alongside The Wisdom of Crowds, The Tipping Point, Freakonomics and covered with dust now, the venerable ‘Being Digital’ by Nicholas Negroponte.
Wikinomics’ thesis is this - that the old company, if not dead, is rotting fishlike from the head. Because new companies, new organisations, new groups and commonalities of interest, are not hierarchical, but self-organising. That ‘the knowledge, resources and computing power of billions of people are self organising into a massive new collective force, interconnected and self orchestrated via blogs, wikis, chat rooms, peer-to-peer networks and personal broadcasting.’ And indeed here we are on Walletwatcher with me commenting unmediated by a conventional publishing house, and you sending me back comments telling me how stupid my points are and how I spelled ‘organising’ wrong.
This then is Web 2.0, not top down anymore, the web gets interactive. Now going into paperback, Wikinomics has won stunning plaudits (though every book I pick up these days appears to be ‘best ever’), including ‘dazzlingly timely’ from the Guardian, it’s an FT and Economist Book of the year, and so on. But perhaps the coollest and most sensible puff comes from Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, who talks of the ‘opportunities’ Web 2.0 presents for companies. And there are fascinating examples of companies throwing out their research programmes to open wiki access, breaking out of the lab to access huge amounts of knowhow among users of the internet. You may be a retired chemist who has discovered a better way to bottle soap? You can submit your ideas to Proctor and Gamble. Wikinomics takes the models of Linux and Wikipedia as examples of how open source and co-operative work can add up to a very big deal. Just as a swarm of ants can collectively move a huge log, our collective intelligence (and we’re getting into Wisdom of Crowds territory here) can produce goods and services better, faster and with more and quicker innovations.
Where Wikinomics is best is in describing these new self forming channels and groups, and talking about the way the next generation is already using them. CEOs may sniff at the idea of social networking, Technorati, Digg et al but they’re already out there and they are changing the way people work, think, talk and communicate about big companies. Think you can ignore Technorati in your company? Go online … you’ll find it’s not ignoring you. The writers also freely acknowledge the limitations of global collaboration - what does this mean for company security and protection of patents for example. What does it mean for workers’ pay and rights. Where it’s weakest is in the sheer weight of words the authors haul into place to make their thesis. Having slogged through ‘The Prosumers’,'Ideogoras’ and ‘the New Alexandrians’ I was struggling a little. This though could be mental flabbiness caused by too much dipping in and out of websites … A whole book? Not me!
And I chafe a little at their sympathetic description of how the BBC is changing itself into a collaborative news medium - yes, with enormous amounts of public money while making commercial capital, a situation bitterly resented by some of its commercial rivals. I’d also argue that the ‘mashup’ approach to music wasn’t invented by the rappers of Sugahill et al in the late seventies, but that they in turn simply copped the technique from Jamaican toasting in the early seventies. Wikinomics is required reading for anyone who runs a company.
Wikinomics (Paperback)
by Don Tapscott (Author), Anthony Williams (Author)
ISBN-10: 184354637X
ISBN-13: 978-1843546375
£8.99
Tags: Wikinomics, web 2.0, don tapscott, wiki, web2.0, wikis, mass collaboration, anthony williams,
