It's war: Brand vs Fans. Hmm, I wonder who'll win?

It seems the lessons of mash-up culture are still not being learnt. The desire to control can be crushing. But there always comes a point when the pips squeak. And in a networked world the squeeks are loud, long and globally shared.

How long is it going to be before this film starts to circulate through non-official and entirely out-of-THEIR-control channels? (first one to spot clips on youtube et al, please comment below!)

The row over Damantus, a movie made by German fans of The Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000, centres on German copyright law and who gets to own IP. Read the BBC report. It looks like "it'll never be shown in front of an audience". Maybe not. A community? quite possibly!

If this dispute couldn't be resolved by those 'in charge' I'm willing to place a hefty bet on 'leaks' taking control from them.

And while I'm happy that'll happen, I'm depressed that those who are doing all in their power to prevent that from happening will actually benefit from it.

The Games Workshop and the Warhammer 40,000 brands can only benefit from the exposure and engagement with the brands that this co-created film represents. Watch this.

Hey, come to think of it, maybe this is just a deep-cover viral scam...

By the way, google are thinking of banning my blog. Honest!

Lower the price and more people pay the piper

The TimesOnline is reporting that 3 out of 5 didn't pay a penny for the latest Radiohead album when offered the chance to download and pay what they wanted.

The average price paid was just £2.90, globally.

And there is much wringing of hands about this in the Times report. How terrible. The grand experiment has failed - is the general sentiment.

But the album has been downloaded 1.2m times in the first month. So the £2.90 a pop (as an average) is not a bad return - given that there are no production costs, and huge cut in marketing and distribution costs.

A bit of context, from everyhit.co.uk:

Lowest-Selling Number One
"The record for a non-limited edition single is "Wonderful" by Ja Rule featuring R Kelly & Ashanti. Entering the chart w/e 6th Nov 2004 it went on to sell a total of 65,000 copies. "

Another upside for Radiohead: Many of those sampling the album 'for free' may yet go on to buy a CD of it - following the same model as those who download free novels online and go on to purchase a hard copy to own on the bookshelf.

Lesson: Careful how you measure success.

First OpenSocial, now Android - Bring Out Your Dead!

Worthy of note today (read the whole thing here):

"A broad alliance of leading technology and wireless companies today joined forces to announce the development of Android, the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices. Google Inc., T-Mobile, HTC, Qualcomm, Motorola and others have collaborated on the development of Android through the Open Handset Alliance, a multinational alliance of technology and mobile industry leaders.

"This alliance shares a common goal of fostering innovation on mobile devices and giving consumers a far better user experience than much of what is available on today's mobile platforms. By providing developers a new level of openness that enables them to work more collaboratively, Android will accelerate the pace at which new and compelling mobile services are made available to consumers."

When I think of those still insisting on locking down, closing out and burrowing into their silos, I can't help thinking of that scene from The Holy Grail: Bring out your dead!






BTW: For a reality check on whose open this is, read mobhappy.

Why you can't expect business as usual

I spent the morning with Alan Moore (Communities Dominate Brands) today. Alan and I agree; where the network touches, it disrupts. Expect to see him publishing more on that before too long.

It's not just about new ways of making content. It's about new ways of making. Everything.
It's not just about new modes of advertising. It's about new modes of production.

(Got an example of how/where the network will disrupt - from education to politics and beyond? Add your contribution to A Shared Vision of a Networked World here.)

We're getting better and better at delivering the right commercial messages at the right time and to the right people, by focusing on communities and making use of social data analytics. And perfecting this has big wins for ad agencies, marketeers, commercial enterprizes and media... and this is a fantastic leap forward compared to the interruptive advertising that has gone before.

But the ultimate wins are about people taking control of the creation of the product they want to own.

Advertising, so far as I can understand, is about closing the gap between the supply of that which is created and the demand for that product. This has profound implications. Implications that are regularly shied away from by the 'business2.0' brigade.

Perhaps they have a fear of biting the hand that feeds? If your pitch is to the suited business community the view from around the curve, if taken to its extremity, is a scary place indeed.

What is disintermediated by truly co-creational processes? The owners of the means of production.
Apply? Who are the mediators in business: Corporations? Companies?

Now, I'm not about to predict the end of the company overnight - just as it's unfair to completely write off mass media. But it is reasonable to understand that just in the same way that mass media has been disrupted by the network (leading to the emergence of a new global mass-niche focused community-driven approach) so the story for corporations must change, too.

Media is having to reinterpret itself (Why Media IS the New Business Ecology, is my stab at this). So must the corporation.

Looking far enough ahead may help us steer the right course. What do you see?

Join in creating a shared vision of the networked future

The wiki vision of a completely networked world

The network will disrupt everywhere it touches. I keep saying it. But what does that actually look like? In detail?

Making predictions is a tough gig. Back in 1987, when I left university, I started writing a book (didn’t we all?). It was called The Auto-composer and I. Don’t bother looking on Amazon, I never got round to finishing it, let alone getting it published.

It was a science fiction novel (I read a lot of it at the time…), the themes it explored were familiar ones to anyone following my blog. But it’s only now that I look back that I find my themes have been quite consistent over 20 years. It’s just my perspective has changed – and how full my glass appears.

At the core of the book was how family life and the normalcy of sustained relationships got disrupted by a centrally-dictated regime of cyclical suspended animation. Everyone had to go into suspended animation for five years every 10 years – thus reducing the human demand for resources by one third (yes, kids, even then we knew resources were finite). Oh, and you only got to live for a standard 70 years.

The society-shattering bit was that you had no choice over the stop-and-start of your five years in suspended animation. Didn’t matter if you were out of synch with the people you came to love. Tough. The centre remained in charge. And that impacts on the value/reliance you can place on relationships. Imagine bringing up children…

This level of control from the centre had implications for almost every aspect of life. No real family life, no real long-term friends, time segmented lives – with no chance for appeal when your deadline arrived.

The auto-composer of the title was a device which played back the music in your head, to you. The notion was that the best sounds you ever wanted to hear were the perfect versions (reflections/echoes even…) of what was in your head. The idea was that they ought to be – at least to you.

Relevance over quality. I got that, even then.

You could share what you’d created with your auto-composer. But few wanted to. One scene I wrote described a party in which everyone was dancing to their own beat. Another simple metaphor for the world I was imagining.

Things got really interesting in the book when the makers of the auto-composer launched the auto-reality… people started getting lost in their own virtual realities. None of these were connected to anyone else in any way whatsoever.

So, I guess I was writing about the same ideas – the impact of control from the centre, the importance of relevance over quality, 20 years ago.

When you look at this from a disconnected perspective the world we’re lead to is a bleak one indeed.

In 1987 I didn’t have an email address or a mobile phone. I had a home pc for playing games on (and writing unfinished novellas…) but it wasn’t connected to anything other than the mains.

And this coloured my vision: Centrally controlled and individually obsessed. Maybe I thought like that because that’s how life actually was in 1987?

I had no way of understanding the positive impact the network would yield.

But with the arrival of a platform to enable the network (that’ll be the internet) – taking control away from the centre - everything changes.

The world becomes a positive place in which we can all engage, share and participate. It’s not their world any more – it’s ours.

The individually-obsessed ‘auto-composer’ would be something much more fun and social seen from the networked world of 2007. Perhaps a Last FM with music I collaborate on with others, people I have learned to trust through recommendation of friends and shared passions. Music made from the nobody-is-as-clever-as-everybody perspective. Global niche orchestras/bands/ensembles – developing tools together and taking their music to the places they (not the man) want it to go.

The auto-reality has obvious echoes in Second Life – and the versions of virtual reality that will follow, those which will enable the cinematic experiences in which you and your friends are the stars – which has to be more fun that sitting back and watching a movie (having one broadcast at you). Joining others in creating a virtual world to share is always more fun than making one you only share with yourself, isn’t it?

And instead of enforced down-time for the vast tracts of the human race through suspended animation, the network is allowing us to create value in new ways which I believe will ultimately create an absolute fit between demand and supply – an improved allocation of resources.

Effective models of co-creation enabled by the network will ultimately mean that only that which there is an actual demand for right now will get created. That has to help us towards a less wasteful world.

The notion that we can’t all participate in the creation of everything we need seems to make common sense.

But I wonder if that’s just because we haven’t cracked the tools yet, haven’t fully transferred into a flow rather than focus world, of the kind Stowe Boyd describes.

I’ve referred before to the absolute (potential) match between the demand curve of the long tail and the shape of the exponential growth of Group Forming Network Theory (Reed’s Law). Fulfilling the potential seems a few steps away – just yet.

But what would an utterly, completely, unrestricted networked world look like?

In simple terms what will change when something which is controlled from the centre is controlled from the edge.

We know that in broad terms it should change how things are produced, how education is shared, how politics works, how mainstream media operates. We know the broad strokes.

But I’d like to paint a more detailed picture of the world.

And it’s right that I leave this to the edge. Please, if you can think of one small detailed example to illustrate this, post it as a comment and/or add to the wiki version of this post (which you’ll find here) http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/The_Wiki_Vision_of_a_Networked_World .

Obviously, pass it on to someone else, share it on your blogs and forums.

Together we will be creating a vision of the future – one which belongs to us all.

CLICK HERE TO ADD YOUR PART OF THE VISION