A little something extra…
I’m always fascinated by the concept of digital sharecropping – it’s the dark side of “crowd sourcing” and goes something like “let’s get a lot people to write-up restaurant reviews for free and then sell ourselves to Google for $500M.”
For as much use as I get out Yelp every week, it’s tough to really condemn their digital share cropping. I write reviews there from time-to-time. I certainly find Yelp valuable and don’t want it to go away. Indeed, I want it to have even more reviews! Amazon is the same way with it’s reviews. And yet, it still troubling somehow to see people freely giving up content that makes those companies money to those two and other services.
I’m not really worried about lowering the barriers for amateurism and dilettantes somehow bringing down our esteemed cultural thunderload, but I do tend to feel that most “share-croppers” (myself included) are in a weird, economic situation. It’s sort of like reverse “piracy,” really: companies getting free stuff from their customers.
With this ever present conflict in my head, then, it was nice coming across the current round of “is the web ripping us off” commentary, as always, associated with the release of a new book, Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget. Check out the associated links below (here and here), they’re nice reading for the topic of “free as in Internet.” You might recall his 2006 essay in a similar area, “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism.” I’m looking forward to the replies from the various Factions of Free – seems like excellent Cory Doctorow baiting! ;>
The Links
- Panasonic flees Microsoft Exchange for IBM cloud
A big win for IBM. - IBM software: big, blue and boring in the 2010s
"I suppose it could be argued that there simply is no next 'big thing' hiding in the corners for IBM to latch onto. But I'd certainly like to see Mills indicate he's looking for it instead of dully reassuring us every eventuality has been, or will be, taken care of no matter what it is." - Chinese Entrepreneurs, Investors on Google – ‘Just Quit. We Don’t Care.’
Nice quotes from Chinese folk on the Google stink up. - Blippy Opens to Public and Scores High-Profile Investors–Including Twitter's Evan Williams–for the Twitter of $$ [BoomTown]
I'm sure there's some "brillant" reason for sharing your transactions. What is it? - Terracotta polishes Quartz job scheduler
- Is the Internet Finally Robbing the Greedy Financier’s Gravy Train?
- VMware hypervisors on the Go
"VMware brags that the Go service, combined with its embedded hypervisor, makes deploying server virtualization a snap, just a few mouse clicks and you are done. The service can do the initial ESXi setup, guiding users with a set of wizards and doing an automatic hardware compatibility check." - Findings – Jaron Lanier Is Rethinking the Open Nature of the Internet
"The basic idea of this contract,” he writes, “is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising." - Understanding the HP-Microsoft deal
Ina Fried tries to dig out more from the HP/MSFT super-partners announcement from yesterday: "The key thing that created the imperative to broaden the relationship is the recognition that the cloud is an inflection point," Muglia said. The shift means customers need a new application model, a new operational model and essentially a new way of thinking about their technology. "The kinds of things we are doing is understanding how we can work together to enable developers to build systems that are cloud-based, always available and can scale out." - Jaron Lanier on the Internet: World Wide Mush
The second time I've seen an old-timer complain about how crap Internet culture/business has gotten: "I was also part of a circle of friends who tried to imagine how computers would fit into the peoples' lives, including how people might make a living in the future. Our dream came true, in part. It turns out that millions of people are ready to contribute instead of sitting passively on the couch watching television. On the other hand, we made a huge mistake in making those contributions unpaid, and often anonymous, because those bad decisions robbed people of dignity. I am appalled that our old fantasies have become so entrenched that it's hard to get anyone to remember that there are alternatives to a framework that isn't working." Digital sharecropping, man!
Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.
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