Joe Wikert's Publishing 2020 Blog

LibraryThing, Shelfari...Whatever

First Amazon bought Abebooks, which already owned a portion of LibraryThing.  Now Amazon buys LibraryThing competitor Shelfari.  Of course neither of these social networks for books talk to one another, nor do they interoperate with any of the other ones out there.  That's why I have a LibraryThing widget on my Publishing 2020 blog but the iRead app is on my Facebook page.  This means that as I read and review a book I have to update both services.  I started using LibraryThing first so it's always my top priority and helps explain why my iRead list is often out of sync.

In the immortal words of Rodney King, why can't we all just get along?  Seriously, there's no good reason why I should have to manage multiple services that are so darned similar.  If I read a book I should be able to enter the info about it in one place and have it picked up everywhere.  Tim O'Reilly makes a wonderful plea for interoperability in this post but I'm not holding my breath waiting for it to happen.

So here's my question: Since it's highly unlikely we'll get all these services connected, why doesn't some enterprising developer take this opportunity to create an uber-service that does it for us?  Wouldn't it be great if this uber-service provided access to all the data from the book-related social networks and allowed you to create a variety of customized widgets that could be easily dropped in to any/all websites, including Facebook?

Feedbooks is an excellent analogy. Their "newspaper" service lets me combine multiple RSS feeds into one Kindle e-book that I can easily (and wirelessly) update with one click.  It's completely changing how I utilize RSS feeds and a model that lends itself to all sorts of interesting solutions.

The Wikinomics Playbook: Mass Collaboration in Action

Have you read Wikinomics yet?  If not, you need to!  Here's my earlier review of the book.  Either way, you'll want to grab a free PDF of "the final chapter" entitled The Wikinomics Playbook: Mass Collaboration in Action.  As promised, this piece was written and developed in an open forum and features coverage of wiki evolution, leadership in collaborative communities, transparency and government (which is probably the first time those last two terms have been used together!).

If you can't tell by now, I'm a big fan of Don Tapscott, co-author of Wikinomics.  If you are too, be sure to check out his New Paradigm website as well as the Wikinomics blog.

Content Access, Sharing and Mashups

This is item #2 in my list of paradigm shifts noted in this earlier post.  In this case, I wanted to consider the impact of social networks on content.

I'm a widget freak and I've never met a Facebook app I didn't like.  Whether it's LibraryThing on my blog or iRead on my Facebook page, I love trying out new widgets and apps.  While these are both great technologies, I don't think we're likely to see anything groundbreaking on this front until content is truly part of the formula.

Imagine a world where you're reading a book on your Kindle and you come across a passage that makes you think of something you and your friend recently discussed.  Wouldn't it be interesting to be able to excerpt that passage and e-mail it to your friend with a note saying, "hey, remember when we talked about this?"  If the model is properly constructed, the message would include an affiliate hook so that if your friend eventually buys that book you'll get a cut of the transaction.

Sharing content is one thing, but how about allowing mashups with it?  What if you could take part of a book, magazine article or other piece of content, add your two cents to it and sell it as a modified version of the original?  Sounds like plagiarism, right?  Not if the appropriate content licensing models are utilized and followed.  Heck, this is exactly what organizations like Red Hat and others have built their business around in the open source world.

Sure, it's much more complicated in the content world, but I'd like to think we can learn a thing or two from organizations like Creative Commons, for example.  Who knows...maybe one day we'll have a model where a great deal of paid content will indeed be available for mashup resale and everyone who contributed to it along the way will get their fair share of the transaction.  How cool would that be?!

Smaller Indiana

What's the "right" number of social networks to join?  That's a question I've asked myself a few times over the past several months.  Using the phrase loosely, I'm already on LinkedIn and Facebook, so why would I need another social network?  Well, despite my best efforts, I'm not finding much of a local component to either of these services.  (Yes, I know all about the various Facebook groups but still, they don't really feel that local.)

Fortunately for me, my colleague Jason Marcuson recently discovered one with more of a local feel and sent me an invitation.  It's called Smaller Indiana and I joined it last week.  I'm still tweaking my profile and all, but I've already found a couple of interesting local networking opportunities on it after only a few days.  If you live in Indiana and are looking for a network with that local feel you ought to give this one a shot.

On a related note, this article in today's local paper talks about how the Indiana "brain drain" might be reversing and becoming more of a "brain gain."  I didn't grow up in this area but I can vouch for the fact that Indiana is a great place to raise a family and offers an excellent cost of living; we just need major league baseball and an NFL team that doesn't melt down after every playoff bye.