Today I watched another talk that touched on some of the issues I mentioned after watching Clay Shirky’s video. In Yochai Benkler talk entitled Open-source economics, he talks about how people who are passionate about topics and technologies are using the web to change the way we look at economics.
Once example he used was Yahoo! versus the Open Directory Project. Yahoo! used to hire professionals to review the pages in its directory. If it was in the directory it was good. Compare a page on the Yahoo! directory to the Open Directory Project which is run by passionate volunteers and you’ll see that there is much more valuable content on the latter. People don’t mind spending time online helping out a cause they find worthwhile or that they’re passionate about - imagine what our patrons could do for our library sites?
That’s all I’ll say (since I don’t want to repeat myself). You can watch the talk for yourself and come to your own conclusions.
