City Lights

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Participation

The power of technology became very evident when reading the passage about Hurricane Katrina and the people who began to sift through all the information on missing people. The information that was initially posted was fragmented and difficult to sort through. One person began to organize the information and it snowballed from there until thousands of information became processed from the work of many volunteers.

Prosumer Communities

I didn't even know what prosumer communities was until I read this book. How it makes sense to involve the customer in the creation of a product. I was particularly interested in the Lego corporation and how initially they responded with threats when receiving feedback and suggestions from their customers. But instead of lawsuits they began to realize the creativity that so many people could bring to their product. Great way to build upon an idea.

Free enterprise and profit

I really struggled with the concept of people offerring so much information without a price. Skeptic that I am. It began to make sense to me after reading about Behlendorf who created the Apache web server. He never made any money off of it and people questioned why (me included). But the book goes on to say how Behlendorf went on and created a new successful company and that might not have been possible had he not become so well known for creating Apache.

I found it very interesting the information about wikipedia and Britannica. The fact that wikipedia contained 4 inaccuracies to Brit's 3! I have always heard how unreliable wikepedia is and never really thought about the people that add the information to it. I also liked the fact that Brit's errors obviously are still present in the printed form while Wikipedia have long been fixed!!

Early Thoughts on Wikinomics

My first thoughts from Don Tapscott's book concern the Shared Spaces, especially MySpace. He talks about the reason teens use myspace is a means to reclaim their private space. The book mentions that teen-agers have lost their place to hang out with their peers and this is their way of communicating and spending time with their friends.
I never thought about this is the way kids are communicating with their friends. I took it for granted that they communicate with their friends the same way we did growing up talking and hanging out at the mall etc.