Jason and Benkler - The Almost debate

I would have liked to see the debate between Benkler and Calacanis that almost happened. Jason make news this past month when he offered to pay the top Diggers to post on Netscape. Jason is turning around the Netscape brand and Benkler is the author of “Coase’s Penguin” a paper on open source principles.

This topic clearly is a big story in the new emerging economics of media production. I normally think very highly of Benkler’s views but I think that Jason makes some good points.. I commented on Jason’s blog about his offer to buy Digg users. “What makes companies like Digg rise fast is the open access to editorial so Jason is leveraging the same dynamics to make a business successful (translation: monetization). In an always connected world Jason has the right to access the people and make any offer he wants. Last time that I checked Digg users don’t have non-competes.”

A comment from user “Steve” on Jason’s blog also writes “It baffles me that bright people, like Benkler, can criticize what are essentially naturally occuring market forces. Take Jason Calacanis out of the equation for a moment, and lets go back to Business 101 class. If there is money to be made, then someone was eventually going to recognize the value of these content producers and offer to pay them for their services. Maybe not as early as Calacanis did, but eventually its gonna happen. And for someone to say its crude because it disrupts the community? As if the “community” is some divinely appointed model. Did it ever occur to you that if the community could so easily be disrupted by naturally occuring market forces then maybe the community model has some fundamental flaws? I know it’s heresy to say that because we are all supposed to be in awe of Digg, but isnt it obvious?”

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 6th, 2006 at 11:33 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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