I let Umair Haque’s Bubblegeneration blog pile up like unread, guilt-inducing copies of The Economist and The New Yorker and anything Clay Shirky writes because it takes time to read and let sink in what he has to say. So here’s my homework, Umair on:
* Media 2.0
* Peer production.
* Edge Competencies.
* Network economics.
* The fabled attention economy.
* And here’s a current post on edge compentences and newspapers, which warns:
Newspapers are canaries in the coal mine. The economic shift that is disrupting the structure of the media industry is deep and pervasive; within the next five years, it will touch all consumer-facing industries. What’s happening to newspapers should serve as a warning signal to players across markets that the deep economics of consumer-facing businesses are undergoing radical change: change as fundamental as that which marked the shift from the industrial to the knowledge economy. To understand this change, let’s define the problem the news market is facing.
The publishers, like the rest of the media industry, are facing a radical shift in industry economics; a structural disruption. Barriers to entry have been vaporized, as have switching costs. At the same time, the market power newspapers could exert over content creators and advertisers is eroding….
News executives must invest in the new media value chain. … What are the segments of this new value chain? As we’ve outlined, microplatforms allow prosumers to create personal media. Smart aggregators syndicate and distribute it. Reconstructors build individualized ‘casts of media for communities of connected consumers….
