As for a business model, it depends on the size of the community. 1% of 100 is small. 1% of 1,000,000 is a possible model. But not for many. I don’t expect to see too many people making a living just off of Web 2.0 on the Web.

It will be the tool-makers that make money. Just as Levi Strauss created a company from the Gold Rush.

Well, it is fun to dream of one big, happy community but these tools will work best for scientists in their daily work when used to increase the diffusion rate of innovation. Getting information away from email into more accessible locations will help collaborative approaches tremendously.

Making Light

But this is not a feature of the technology. Just how it is being used right now.

Facebook, Flickr etc. all are really for play (although there are some interesting experiments for corporations) and the money that follows them is not much different than that which funds Superbowls or TV.

So, not surprisingly, most of the conversation deals with things that I find ephemeral, even if they account for a large part of our consumer society. It is as though everyone want to be the digital equivalent of Tickle Me Elmo or a Cabbage Patch Kid - the latest fad.

That is not where these tools will have their biggest impact. It is their ability to leverage human filtering processes, permitting much larger amounts of data to be examined, more information to be distributed and more knowledge to be created.

I have seen first-hand how these tools can help researchers solve difficult problems. They have permitted me to overcome barriers that would have taken months to solve if at all.

Properly used, human social networks and these digital tools can disperse information widely, putting it in the hands of people who can use it. In research, they are simply a means to an end. Out in Bubbleland, they are the end.

Now that I’ve read it, it’s a weaker argument than I imagined. It basically comes off like a cliched “kill your television” rant that could have been written any time in the last 50 years. Hey kids, tv is a waste, go outside and fly a kite! Television is not the issue here. Before there was television, people still liked to relax in their spare time. They listened to the radio, went to movies, read books, sang songs, etc. They didn’t spend their time working. He uses the example of playing WOW. The key word there is “playing”, not “working”. Editing a wikipedia article is work. Writing a blog is work. I don’t see Joe Average coming home from the steel mill, cracking open a beer and then fixing typos in wiki articles to relax. Some people do find such things fun. As Jimbo Wales often points out, the majority of the work on Wikipedia is done by around 500 people total. Those people seem to get off on the process, on the rules of Wikipedia (to me that’s one of Wikipedia’s great problems, to those who do the most work, the process is more important than the content or the accuracy of what’s produced).

The one part of his argument I do buy is the sheer numbers. Although it’s a tiny, tiny minority, there are probably more than 500 people who would get off on enforcing the rules of Wikipedia or some such activity. So over time, I do expect to see more participation. But no, I don’t expect to see television disappear, and no, I don’t expect to see leisure time suddenly become community effort time. And that does not bode well for professional social networking projects. If you’re asking people to participate because it’s a fun way to spend their spare time, they’re probably not going to work on projects that are what they do all day at work.

Oh, and the irony of it all is that if you took away the television programs he decries, you’d lose the subject matter of 90% of the online projects he’s promoting. No TV means no Picard versus Kirk arguments, after all.

One more thing. You are sitting right in the middle of the phase shift being brought on by disruptive technology. Scientific publishing even five years from now will be very different than today. Scary for some but the best times to have real impacts in the world are when things are shifting.

So even engaging a community with a simple blog can be a potent tool. Good conversations are the key.

I really enjoy your blog and it has led me to aggregate not only the feed for Bench Marks but also for CSH Protocols. I just wish you had more time to post. I like your point of view.