Umair Haque / Bubblegeneration

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Peer Production Goes Physical

Etsy is a nice example of peer production moving slowly into the physical. It's a site which essentially enables a Long Tail in handicrafts - a low-value physical domain (vs media; a high-value digital domain).

This is in line with what my general thesis, which is peer production moving slowly from digital, now that it's exhausting the highest-value segments there, to physical - again, moving from low to higher and higher value domains.

Smart players (viz KP and Zazzle) have been tracking this trend for a while, and have already placed their bets. For example, Zazzle shifts physical peer production decisively into higher value domains by leveraging existing brands.

But, for the most part, the usual suspects continue to be more than a little suspicious of peer production from a monetization standpoint, despite the growing wealth of data (SecondLife, Habbo Hotel stats, Wikipedia traffic) - which leaves a nice market gap for smart entrepreneurs to prove them wrong, and get acquired.

-- umair // 9:47 AM // 2 comments

Comments:

Interesting post on your favourite topic.
"Where are all the UK start-ups?"

http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2005/07/where_are_all_the_uk_startups.shtml

# //

Rajan // 7:34 PM

Yeah, I have talked to Tom about it - my solution is to bring everyone together for a night of Web/Media 2.0 boozery :)

More details soon...

# //

umair // 5:42 PM