Wikinomics
In just the last few years, in one of the most profound changes of our time, traditional collaboration--in a meeting room, a conferencec all, even a convention center--has been superseded by collaborations on an astronomical scale. Today, encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. Flickr, Second Life, YouTube, and other thriving online communities transcend social networking to pioneer a new form of collaborative production. While some leaders fear the heaving growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics shows this fear is folly. Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success. Mature companies can cultivate nimble, trust-based relationships with external collaborators to form vibrant business ecosystems. Wikinomics challenges our most deeply-rooted assumptions about business and aims to be a road map for doing business in the 21st century.--From publisher description.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
9mentions
9people
2007–2024years
44% recommend44% neutral11% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Hi everyone, I wish I was clever enough to have orchestrated all this, but in fact am not. Very nice of Chris to include me in his list.
Though I will say that this list is missing a few good books:
22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
48 Laws of Power
Antifragile
The Fish That Ate the Whale
Wikinomics
Contagious
The Pirate's Dilemma
and I think PG's book of essays is worth reading for any founder as well
- When I read Wikinomics things really clicked. We were entering a new world where more data is shared and more people collaborate.
But that's not how things appear to have happened with the many closed platforms and publications: Facebook, NYTimes, Itunes and the closing of data.gov etc.
What happened?
- It's hard to categorically state whether data should be free or not. A great book to read about this is Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (http://www.amazon.com/dp/1591841380/), which describes many cases of data being made free in order to elicit insight from the masses.
I think an interesting space, in particular, is those companies that distill large amounts of data into small relevant sets. Google is the first example that comes to mind, but search is not the only approach to this. Another example is YC's own LikeBetter, who sneakily collected lots of training data before launching this PAT thing. You can now figure exactly how your individuality personality compares to thousands of others, based on these millions of clicks they've receieved.
Are Google and LikeBetter making data free, or the opposite? There are trade secrets involved there, but we might not consider that "data". You can see interesting views and presentations derived from the data (search results, or personality tests), but you can never see all the data at once... nor would you want to.
- About 14 months ago, I had little knowledge of how to execute a startup. In particular, I wasn't familiar with any online marketing tactics. The following books helped me a lot in that respective, and more:
1. Positioning, 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing/Branding, Focus, Marketing Warfare
2. Purple Cow, All Marketers are Liars, Permission Marketing (I didn't like "The Big Moo", "Free prize inside" or "Small is the new Big").
3. Founters At Work
4. Wikinomics, Wisdom of Crowds, The Tipping Point (Blink! was alright). I am looking forward to reading "The Long Tail" and "The starfish and the spider"...has anyone read them yet?
6. Why We Buy
7. Hackers and Painters
8. The E-Myth revisited
9. The Art of the Start
10. On War, The Art of War by Machiavelli and Sun Tzu (not exactly for startups, but definitely useful)
11. Crossing the Chasm
- Good food for thought and hopefully an inspiration for people to build on.
The wiki movement has stagnated for a long time. Some reasons are internal e.g., overpromising on semantic technologies and never really delivering a step change in functionality that will delight people the way the original wikis did.
But most of the reasons for the wiki no-show are external, driven by the dominant economics of the modern digital experience which despite the optimistic early book with the same title, is not Wikinomics.
Yet the cognitive stress from information overload is not getting less. If we ever manage to get away from the user-as-product paradigm the design and function of wikis will be a key ingredient for the next digital revolution.
- Well, the "end of the corporation" has been predicted (as a fad) many times post WWII, and I think it's an error to assume that the corporation will be substituted for some form of "wikinomics". Corporations will always be needed to mobilize capital for large projects (think: a steel mill or mining the moon, etc) and the author was right to point that out. Also, there will come a time when these "wikinomics-based" systems will be turned into platforms, much like Facebook is a platform, and platforms inevitably become big corporations too.
