Writing

We are very happy about the success of our new website. It has become a vibrant hub for thoughtful exchange and we hope we can facilitate even more dialogue that our audience finds interesting. This would not be possible if [...]  Read more

Our sessions event happened almost a month ago and it is starting to fade into my memory.But there is at least one phrase that came out of Sessions that we are still using with regularlity at Union Square Ventures. And [...]  Read more

There was a lot of discussion about the relationship between web service providers and consumers. This relationship is obviously especially important in services where the consumers are also the producers of the service. One thread of this discussion was about [...]  Read more

There was a lot of talk at Sessions about trust. The word appears 33 times in the transcript. Jeff Jarvis mentioned it 11 times himself. Here, Jeff makes the point that value is shifting from content to trust. “And so [...]  Read more

One of the insights from our Sessions event was from Yochai Benkler who said the following about peer production: we do have very good research on how adding money undermines social motivations depending on contentsI am not sure how to [...]  Read more

Here are some more of the insights that we gained from our Sessions discussion...Michael Parekh makes the point that all peers are not created equal…“Another thing, the term peer to peer, one of the things that's implicit, unfortunately, is that [...]  Read more

Umair Haque said something (or actually quoted someone) at our Sessions event that has been rattling around my brain for the past week.Umair said: Herbert Simon said it in 1971, which is that "What does an abundance of information create?" [...]  Read more

Social production systems seem to deliver a much higher portion of the economic value created to the consumers than traditional production systems do. As Tim O’Reilly says,"if you look at … Ebay or Google, even though they're very, very successful [...]  Read more

As we get a chance to go back through the transcript of Sessions, we are finding a number of themes that are worth highlighting. We will try to get these thoughts up on the site over the next week or [...]  Read more