Hidden Economies and the Shifting of Value

"The Clothesline Paradox"

Tim O Reilly [10.4.2012]

Edge Conversations, www.edge.org

Stuart Brand's Clothesline Paradox:

You put your clothes in your dryer, and the energy you use gets measured and counted; you put your clothes on the clothesline, and it disappears from the economy.

On the internet, the value is created somewhere, and captured somewhere else. (The sun creates the value, and your wet clothes capture the value). Tim Berners Lee created value in the internet, but did not capture it. Goldman Sach's did not create value, they captured it.

Free content on the web - Users getting something for nothing:

Actually, most people pay comcast $80 a month for content on the web. And what's more, it's actually comcast who gets the free ride now. They don't have to pay television networks for their content; on the internet, the users create that content. Comcast is getting the free ride, not the users.

Finding meaning in the data is the new value generation.

http://edge.org/conversation/-39the-clothesline-paradox-39-

"Thinking in Network Terms"

Albert-lászló Barabási [9.24.2012]

Edge Conversations, www.edge.org

Call it what you will: Network Science, Human Dynamics, Computational Social Science, Big Data; The question now is not how you collect the data, but how you make sense of it.

Barabasi continues to talk about how understanding networks allows us to get more out of the data.

http://edge.org/conversation/thinking-in-network-terms

Further Links:

Tim O Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., one of the leading computer book publishers in the world.

http://edge.org/memberbio/tim_o_reilly

O'Reilly Radar: Insights, analysis and research about emerging technologies

http://radar.oreilly.com/

ALBERT-LÁSZLÓ BARABÁSI is a Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University, where he directs the Center for Complex Network Research, and holds appointments in the Departments of Physics, Computer Science and Biology, as well as in the Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women Hospital, and is a member of the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

http://edge.org/memberbio/albert_laszlo_barabasi

Barabasi Labs, Center for Complex Network Research, Northeastern University, Boston

http://www.barabasilab.com/