The strength of ordinary people

People Power By Chris Anderson Via Wired Magazine

The first industrial revolution was driven by the replacement of human labor with the steam engine. Then, Ford's invention of the assembly line, along with advancements in steel and plastics technology, led to the second industrial revolution. Following that was Silicon Valley and the information age. Each era was spurred by more efficient, cost-effective, and widespread production methods, which boosted productivity to new heights and transformed the world.

Now we have a volunteer workforce made up of amateurs. Let's call it collaborative production. From Amazon to Myspace to Craigslist, these internet companies are building their business successes on user-contributed content. This might be the most striking feature of Web 2.0. From blogs to video sharing, its tools for production are completely democratized. Its growth is fueled by the spare time, talents, and skills of ordinary people. When these things come together, they create a vast, decentralized workforce.

The evidence is all around us. Well-known examples include Wikipedia and Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing service. In Second Life, there are entirely user-generated realms created serendipitously by its users. YouTube's engaging video-sharing technology has attracted countless viewers.

The traces we leave online casually will also become a goldmine. A significant part of Amazon and Netflix's value comes from the tens of thousands of customer reviews. Your clicks on Amazon can lead to better recommendations for future users. The search terms you enter on Google and the related web pages you receive provide feedback to carefully designed search algorithms. Your clicks on ads not only bring profits to Google but also inform them how much to charge the next advertiser. These companies have found ways to harness collective intelligence, extracting and utilizing information that was previously latent and lost.

But the real miracle lies in the millions of people like us who, through our conscious efforts, are rapidly developing the internet: 80 million MySpace pages, 40 million bloggers, and nearly a million Wikipedia editors. The result is a culture of sharing made up of fans, reviewers, and like-minded individuals. There's also open-source software, which has changed the landscape of enterprise servers (Linux) and user desktops (Firefox), and has given IBM new life, whose prosperity stems from building its software and services on collaboratively produced code.

Previous industrial revolutions were also built on individual contributions, but back then, work was just work. Workers were paid based on hours worked, whether in factories or office cubicles. Today's collaborative production operates entirely on a non-commercial economic basis. Its currency is reputation, expression, gratitude, Whuffie (a form of currency in a sci-fi novel by Cory Doctorow), or spontaneous whimsy.

This may sound a bit like the utopian ideals of the 1960s. After all, Marx himself believed that the industrial proletariat would rebel against the bourgeoisie and establish a state where the means of industrial production are owned by the workers. Echoes of this optimistic triumphalism can be found in the blogosphere.

However, equating collaborative production with anti-capitalism is mistaken. This isn't a battle between amateurs and professionals; both sides benefit. Companies aren't merely exploiting free labor; they're also creating tools for self-expression. The noisy mob cannot replace companies; they provide new resources that fuel the growth of a new generation of businesses, understanding talents beyond Hollywood's vision, knowing that credit outweighs passion, and realizing that each of us possesses knowledge useful to someone, somewhere.

Who is involved in this field? Amazon's community reviews

Google's user-based algorithms

News Corp's 80 million MySpace pages

Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing

(Translated by Undersound)