In several discussions with various partners we’ve touched upon the topic of leadership in the last couple of weeks. There’s a lot of interesting aspects on that topic, but in our last discussion I came to realize that leadership might be a term that has no meaning anymore in our time. In a world that is being scattered by so many different opinions, voices and information that has lead to the empowerment of the individual I wonder whether anyone is still being lead by someone else. In my opinion we’ve come to the end of leadership…

Release 2.0⁵ plots a number of interesting ‘applications’ on the edge of the Web. Zillion Dollar Dash is Jimmy Gutterman’s take on the music industry. Apart from the known examples of this extremely disrupted industry he ended with Amie Street. Amazon backed they explore demand-based pricing. Jimmy even dreams of “an MP3 futures market”. This is exactly what struck me!

The music industry has based its ‘empire’ on scarcity. Buying a record has been very much easier than copying the songs for a long time. But, not any more. Digitalization and the Internet are rapidly removing the scarcity of songs and albums. Any time, anywhere. The best way to make money of music is to sell iPods. But what Jimmy observed as an interesting model, demand-based pricing, might reintroduce scarcity again. Though I doubt it will solve the problems of the ‘traditional’ music industry. Read on to find out how a song might become scarce again.

Don’t you just hate those commercial interruptions? Just when you’re settled in and the tension builds, you get dragged out of the story to be forced to watch a message that primarily says: buy me, buy me, buy me. But there’s an end coming to that! Because of the rise of new technologies and the internet the world not only has become much more transparent, resulting in knowledgeable consumers that know when something is being sold to them, but moreover we hate all those interruptions that we haven’t asked for: we switch the channel. As marketing guru Seth Godin (amongst others) has said before on this blog: the end of the power to interrupt is near, it is much more about engaging the consumer. Only when you’re able to engage people your commercial message can be effective. Looks like advertisers are finally catching up on that idea as well. Watch this example around the series premiere of Heroes in the US…

Today we are interviewing Benjamin Barber. Part of that interview will be published here soon. Barber is well known for his book titled ‘Jihad vs. McWorld‘ about the growing tensions between capitalism on the one hand that is almost dissolving the world into one and religious, ethnic and racial conflicts that are fragmenting the world more and more. His new book carries the illustrious title: ‘Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults and Swallow Citizens Whole‘. In it he basically describes how consumerism has now gone so far that it starts to threaten our democracy. As adults we are already progressed too far on the spiral of consumerism and for our children it might be too late as well. Could that really be true? Read on…

Last week professor Jos de Haan was appointed to the chair of ‘ICT, culture and knowledge society’ at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. In his acceptance lecture he talked about the decreasing interest of young people in cultural historical traditions and about the effect the internet has had on the lack of this interest. Yes, when I was researching this generation for our latest study I realized how much technology was part of the daily lives of this generation. But I doubt whether the use of the internet is causing the digital generation to loose its heritage. Isn’t that something of all ages?

We have talked about trust before! One of our discussions was about trust and distrust. I am always amazed about the polarity of the different perspectives in these conversations. Are people naturally distrustful? Innocent until proven guilty is the cornerstone of our (modern) civilization. But in trust we are almost all to be distrusted until proven worthy.

Wikipedia is one of the success stories of a trust model not based on distrust, but on trust. It has seen it’s attacks, and recently the WikiScanner revealed what we have always known. Unarguably successful but malignancy increasingly incurs a heavy burden on maintaining the integrity of the encyclopaedia. With Wikipedia 2.0 they hope to battle these problems, but they propose to completely reverse their standpoint. They intend to stop trusting you!

I was triggered by a Dutch talk show last week (”Rondom 10 8/9/7″ in Dutch) about anonymity on the net. There is a famous Dutch blog called ‘GeenStijl‘. They are well known for their radical new way of journalism: that is in the form they present their ‘facts’ and have others interact with it. To some of the guests on the show the anonymity that is being provided by the blog enhances the hatred among the users whereas other guests propagated the anonymity because they believed it was part of their right on free speech. The topic didn’t really trigger me that much, but the complete ignorance of some of the people present about how and why people use the internet was shocking. Was this an example of a clash of generations?

As there was nothing on TV…again…this weekend, I started browsing YouTube. And to my surprise (but probably not to most of you) Fremantle’s the X-factor has started again in the UK. Back in Holland, I dread watching the show on TV, because they tend to drown themselves in their features. But I caught myself having fun with it on YouTube. Why is that? I wondered whether this was what co-creation is all about. Much to my surprise I did NOT (yes, that’s in capitals) have the same experience when visiting the X-factor site, the place where I am supposed to have this experience…

FabLab is an unintended result of a problem at the MIT. Neil Gershenfeld did not have the funds to create a factory for his students to build real prototypes for their designs. He created the course ‘How to make (almost) anything’ which was a complete success. But not only for this students, numerous interested people of all sorts of backgrounds attended his course. Now FabLab is expanding. And the ‘plotline’ or ‘title’ Neil is using for what he calls the next revolution is Personal Fabrication.

One interesting application is distribution of ‘design’ digitally. If ‘design’ would be open source and the ‘compilation’ of this source code could be done locally it opens up interesting opportunities. But is also dramatically transforms logistics.