Free Culture and Attention as Currency
Most web assets from the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google, Tumblr, Foursquare and a gazillion others appear to be free, opening floodgates of content, ranging from the genius of Wikipedia/Ushahidi to the apparently innocuous LOLcats.
The shelf life of tweets, status updates, YouTube videos and, hence, their footprints on the public memory, is dropping by the second.
While the repercussion of such an open and free culture invites a discussion in itself, let’s talk about in the context of the startup ambience.
To begin with, let us do away with presumptions of terms like “free” and “open.”
With “free,” we imply Freedom at almost a Zero price. Let’s not confuse this with “freebies” or “giveaways.” With “openness” (coders, rejoice!) we imply an Open Source culture, where the ratio of creators to consumers is shooting up faster than ever.
Fifty years ago, when content producers were a privileged club, the ratio was probably 1:10 million. Now, with the barriers lifted, a swamp of creators are competing the bigwigs, creating a culture with 1,000 broadcasters for 10 million listeners. The ratio is only poised to rise with time.
Continue reading »
Thank you Google, for the Antithesis of a More Social Network
[Ed: I know we've had a LOT of posts on Google+ here recently. But I wanted to give my bloggers a voice. This is an interesting viewpoint from India, so I hope you will read it.]
The first reaction to all the talk around Google+ and it’s Facebook-killing armor was, “Oh God, not another one.”
Keeping the early adopter community in context, there isn’t a desire to connect more, or even connect better. Unless, of course, you are another Guru, pushed compulsively to opine on recycling and rehashing “content.”
Anyway.
Let’s take a moment to talk about the very premise of “friending” on Facebook. We agree mutually to allow someone to consume our feed of information, while consenting to consume theirs. That is, assuming we haven’t hidden/blocked them from News Feeds. Fair enough?
Bubble or No Bubble, We’ll Still Be Social
“To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” ~ Mark Twain
Far too much has been said on the valuations of the social web startups.
With hundreds of “me-too” of them fetching record influx of hands-on capital, a dash of cynicism is all but obvious. Ideas like Color, which wouldn’t have cleared seed-level funding a year or two back, spent $350,000 solely on buying a new domain! Even for a startup that fetched $41 million, that is plain wasteful, if not irrationally exuberant.
The Guru is dead, long live the Guru.
Incessant “social media for business” workshops mushrooming all across India are minting unthinkable cash from what can best be justified as rudimentary skills in social media. Redundant strategies are disbursed in sessions with over 500 attendees, about an area as dynamic as social media! In other words, there’s a whole pack of self-proclaimed SM wolves (another designation, yay!), waiting to pounce on laggard corporations.
I posed this question to one of the breed recently at a conference. And the answer? Continue reading »
