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Open Content and Value Creation
Magnus Cedergren writes "Which are the driving forces behind the creation of Open Content? What value is created? That is the major questions I try to answer in my paper in the journal First Monday. I would like to thank all you people participating in my study in different ways."
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Yes but Wikipedia is very restrictive and it outsources a lot of its content and fucntionality to Google. Also, you can't write "original articles", that is articles that have never been published on the Internet before. I was writing about a A famous Afgani Scientist but I got it deleted because it failed the so called "google test". They also delete articles that they don't agree with hiding under a thin NPOV "mask". So if you want to write something new or contraversial, don't use wikipedia.
Without proper tools, how can people hope to create content? I know someone is going to say, "Oh, we have the tools!" But are those tools easy and innovative to use? Most tools are shit, I'm sorry to say. Most tools aren't intuitive at all.
What will drive open content is an open, standard, easy way of creating content. A suite, if you will. Until that exists, one can kiss open content goodbye, because the effort is largely not worth it.
A case in point- look at game mods. When a game comes with an editor of sorts, people mod said games quite happily. TOOLS. That's the key.
We have no tools.
Open content, like free software, has use value but because anyone can reproduce and distribute it for next to no cost it doesn't really have much of an exchange value :-)
This stuff has been discussed quite a bit at Project Oekonux and there is an interesting essay, GNU/Linux is not a thing of value - and that is fine! which does explore these ideas, however it is a bit hard to follow because it's only a partial translation of a German document.
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I guess that depends on if you are talking about physical or digital. In the digital realm:
/ links/clipar t.html
(For pictures:)
http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad
http://www.pdimages.com/
(For sheet music:)
http://www.sheetmusicarchive.net/
http://www.sheetmusic1.com/new.great.music.html
If I can google up counter examples in 30 seconds, I have a hard time with the phrase "But it aint going to happen". Somebody spends the time to collect, organize and provide the bandwith for these items. There is even more content in the text world (the free Wikipedia was mentioned, but there are other collections such as PlanetMath).
So no, I don't expect the physical world will see a lot of free content, but once content is created, why *not* put some of it out on the net. I find a lot of my computer consulting business results from doing side work to "help out". The "foot in the door" method seems similar to a little fame for "open content". Heck it might even be profitable.
Sig under construction since 1998.
Yeah, open content's nice. No royalties (sheet music), or public domain pictures would be nice
There's plenty of public domain pictures available on government web sites. Anything relating to anything the government does (military stuff, criminals, national parks, public officials) is good to go.
I also frequent an art site with an extensive collection of stock photography that is free for non-commercial use. I've used a fair bit of it in my open source art projects. It's only free if it's in the stock photography section, though.
http://www.deviantart.com
no thanks