Her corollary prediction was that people would instead be paid for “performances,” such as public speaking or consulting or executive teaching, because these can’t be copied so easily and don’t scale well given the human desire for physical presence. This prediction also seems to be coming true.

Lots of people got pretty upset with Dyson when she made these arguements. Writers, in particular, thought it unfair and wrong that they should have to learn to be public speakers to make a living. Her protestation that she was predicting, not advocating, these trends fell largely on deaf ears.

But I think it’s a gross error to define “success” so high that an idea can only be successful if it’s so huge that it’s easy to monetize…or even to universally define success in monetary terms at all.

Now, unlike some, I have absolutely nothing against making money. I’m running a business that I expect to make a great deal of it, based on an idea my partner and I had for ways to reduce the expenses and general pain involved in other businesses, and I make no apologies for my profit motive.

But a large part of the beauty of the internet is that it allows people to bring ideas to a global audience for a cost so negligible that the ideas can catch on and become viable in a huge community, _without_ the need to monetize them in order to recoup expenses and produce a profit.

Some ideas produce real value but are nevertheless hard to successfully monetize. Meetup.com seems a good example. (I can think of a few ways that could have been more successfully monetized, but none of them are either obvious or foolproof.) This does not make them failures unless their creators view success entirely in monetary terms (or, as may be the case with meetup, have sold their souls to investors on the basis of unrealistic RoI projections).

So, hooray for the folks who can monetize their ideas successfully…it’s harder than it looks and they deserve every dime they can make. But let’s put aside the condescending about “the real world” for those who either choose not to focus on ease of monetization or find themselves confronted with value too diffuse to successfully capture. Whether you believe it or not, they live in the real world too, and some of them are doing a lot to make it a better place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie

(Heck, I just edited the article, just to clean up some language — Wikipedia is an excellent example of this post’s subject.)

As to the Meetup question — it’s true, we shouldn’t expect something for nothing. Part of the problem is that they built a strong community (or a series of strong communities) without charging. Then they attempted to monetize those communities. I’d argue that this is psychologically different from starting to charge for a service. Example: When Six Apart began to charge for their latest Movable Type version, I may not have *liked* it, but I was free in the marketplace to make my own choice — move to a different system, keep using the old free version, or pay them for an upgrade. I recognize that Six Apart is a company, and that companies have loss leaders.

But changing over from free to paid feels different when it’s a community. Imagine that I’ve started a salon in my living room. People come, the conversation is great, the reputation of my salon grows. One day I stand before the salon and say, you know, I have to pay rent here, so if you want to keep coming you’ll have to pay me. The normal response, I think, would be — why do we have to meet at your place at all?

MEL, thats precisely my point, why do people flee when something like Meetup starts to charge. What planet are we living in. Do we really think that Meetup should have created all this value…for nothing. This isnt so much enchanted as delirious. So my move from Movable Type to Typepad, I was kind of wondering when and how I would be able to reward these innovators.

I dont know what wuffie means but now, thanks to Amoeda, I now know where to look. Thanks.

Amoeda, This is naive of me, I’m sure, but don’t all markets start “fat” and then develop “long tails” when there is enough wealth that we can support people part time to create things for which there is not enough demand to sustain them full time and enough concentrations of interest that the mainstream begins to fragment. In this moment, people are all “about” satisfying themselves and they do so without regard to what the consumer wants and where the “fat” part of the market is. Most of them will say stuff like, “I do this for myself and if others like it, fine.” Now the market kind of turns inside out. For a long time it exercises a conservative effect on cultural productions. It pushes producers to care about utility more than expression and when addressing the latter, to move to the fat part of the marketplace not the tail. But once people are producing part time, for themselves and a couple of others, now the constraints come off, and cultural innovation is now feverish. So, yes, this is what maturing markets do. It’s like the next step after division of labor. DofL says that people can devote themselves to one thing and everyone will reap the rewards that come therefore. Post DofL says, now someone can devote themselves to one thing and to whatever they can imagine in that domain. Clearly, I am just babbling and now I’m going to stop. Thanks! Grant

I also feel like saying the word “whuffie” here. It’s amazing to me what people will do for egoboos, or even a meaningless score.