Wikinomics

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything is a book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, first published in December 2006. It explores how some companies in the early 21st century have used mass collaboration (also called peer production) and open-source technology, such as wikis, to be successful.

About the Author

Don Tapscott is an internationally renowned authority, writer, consultant and speaker regarding the strategic impact of information technology on innovation, marketing and talent. He has authored or co-authored eleven widely read books on technology in business and society. His upcoming book is Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing the World (October 2008). Don sold his company New Paradigm in 2007 to nGenera where he is Chairman of the nGenera Innovation Network. He is Adjunct Professor of Management at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

Anthony D. Williams has been researching and writing about trends in technology and society for over a decade. His work has been featured in Business Week, the Globe and Mail and the Times of India and his advice sought by fortune 500 firms and international institutions, including the World Bank. Anthony holds a Masters in Research from the London School of Economics and is Vice President and Executive Editor at nGenera Insight.

Wikinomics explains how mass collaboration is happening not just on websites like Wikipedia and YouTube, but also at traditional companies that have embrased technology to breathe new life into their enterprises.

The Wikinomics Blog is produced by the team at nGenera Insight, a think tank headed by IT strategist, speaker, and best-selling author Don Tapscott. Since 1993 nGenera Insight has provided clients with insightful, thought-provoking analysis of emerging technology trends and their business impact. We serve as a “strategic early warning system” for our clients, helping them discern real imperatives from all the hype and noise.

Introduction

This media in the online blog is for the purpose of revision for the A2 summer Media exam.
We will be looking at at least two types of media as outlined by the OCR syllabus. Our chosen examples are Film and Social Networking.

1. We have looked at YouTube as an example of Media in the online age. Obviously, YouTube is a product of the internet and couldn't exist without it. We have looked at the different ways that people use YouTube and examples that illustrate this.

2. We have studied the theorist Michael Wesch and should be able to explain 'Cultural Inversion' and the 'Collapse of Context', in relation to how people use YouTube.

3. How people use YouTube differently to social networking sites like Facebook. We will also be asked about other networking sites like Twitter, Flickr and Tumblr etc

4. The next part of Media in the Online Age, we looked at Chris Anderson's Longtail Theory. This is the idea of many niche markets replacing the mass market. That is, selling less of more. Amazon, iTunes and LoveFilm are examples of businesses which illustrate this theory.

5. We next looked at Tapscott and Williams' "Wikinomics". We were asked to explain this. This is the theory, which explains how businesses have had to change in the online age. Media businesses we could consider are: LoveFilm, iTunes, HMV, Facebook, YouTube and Second Life etc.
We need to understand the terms:
Prosumer
Peering
Collaboration
Global Plant Floor
Ideagora
We can explain these on my blog and apply to the examples.

LongTail Theory

When consumers are offered infinite choice, the true shape of demand is revealed. And it turns out to be less hit-centric than we thought. People gravitate towards niches because they satisfy narrow interests better, and in one aspect of our life or another we all have some narrow interest (whether we think of it that way or not).
The Long Tail book is about the big-picture consequence of this: how our economy and culture is shifting from mass markets to million of niches. It chronicles the effect of the technologies that have made it easier for consumers to find and buy niche products, thanks to the "infinite shelf-space effect"--the new distribution mechanisms, from digital downloading to peer-to-peer markets, that break through the bottlenecks of broadcast and traditional bricks and mortar retail.
The Long Tail was popularized by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article, in which he mentioned Amazon.com and Netflix as examples of businesses applying this strategy.

The distribution and inventory costs of businesses successfully applying this strategy allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The total sales of this large number of "non-hit items" is called the Long Tail.

Given enough choice, a large population of customers, and negligible stocking and distribution costs, the selection and buying pattern of the population results in a power law distribution curve, or Pareto distribution. This suggests that a market with a high freedom of choice will create a certain degree of inequality by favoring the upper 20% of the items ("hits" or "head") against the other 80% ("non-hits" or "long tail").

A frequency distribution with a long tail has been studied by statisticians since at least 1946. The term has also been used in the insurance business for many years.

Anderson argues that products in low demand or that have a low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough. The Long Tail is a potential market and, as the examples illustrate, the distribution and sales channel opportunities created by the Internet often enable businesses to tap that market successfully.

An Amazon employee described the Long Tail as follows: "We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday." Anderson has explained the term as a reference to the tail of a demand curve. The term has since been rederived from an XY graph that is created when charting popularity to inventory. In the graph shown above, Amazon's book sales or Netflix's movie rentals would be represented along the vertical axis, while the book or movie ranks are along the horizontal axis. The total volume of low popularity items exceeds the volume of high popularity items.