The Culture of Participation
Business 2.0 :: Online Article :: Future Boy :: The Culture of Participation
By Erick Schonfeld, July 18, 2005
Blogs, wikis, Flickr, Zazzle. These are not the names of strange aliens from other planets. They are the expressions of an emerging culture right here on Earth. It’s a culture in which every citizen is a publisher, photographer, programmer, or product designer. It’s a culture that's blurring the lines between amateur and professional, consumer and creator. It’s the culture of participation.
Blogs have given rise to millions of citizen journalists, all self-publishing maniacally in search of an audience. Wikis, of course, are group blogs that turn the participation dial up a notch by allowing multiple authors to contribute to the same webpage. The photo-sharing website Flickr is a natural consequence of the spread of digital cameras: Snap pictures, download them to a computer, and upload them to the Web (where friends, or anyone else, can see them). Video will be next.
But the culture of participation goes beyond blogs, wikis, and showing off your digital photos. Joe Kraus, one of the original founders of Excite, is now CEO of JotSpot, a corporate wiki subscription service. He says, "I think wikis are the tip of a larger trend: do-it-yourself."
While wikis make it easy for people to publish a communal website, Kraus thinks "the next leap is to make it easy for people to publish an application." He's talking about taking a lot of the stuff that people currently manage in Excel spreadsheets and making it simple to publish those things on the Web as applications that can, say, track deals, contracts, projects, or wedding invitations. In other words, he wants to make it easy for people to create their own custom software and share it with friends and colleagues without having to know how to write a single line of code.
The basic premise of the culture of participation is that any content that can be created digitally can be shared with the world. And, consequently, any digital content can be turned into a product and sold on the Web. That's the fundamental insight of a startup called Zazzle, which has been quietly building a business over the past two years by allowing anyone to upload digital images to its website and print them on T-shirts, posters, and greeting cards. Starting today, Zazzle will also sell stamps that can be customized with pictures of your dog or Mickey Mouse. (Branded images from Disney, Fox, and other companies are available for mixing and matching as well.)
Here's the catch: Zazzle is more than just a do-it-yourself site. Many people choose to make their photos or artwork available to anyone who visits. Zazzle has thousands of branded images on the site, but hundreds of thousands more are contributed by individuals. Members generally receive a 10 percent royalty every time one of their images is used for a T-shirt or poster Zazzle sells. (Disney and Fox get many times more than that.) "The marketplace succeeds only if we can offer something for everyone," explains Zazzle CEO Robert Beaver. That's why he offers the full spectrum, from Winnie the Pooh posters to sci-fi artwork created by freelance graphic designers. It's worth noting, however, that the majority of Beaver's sales (he won't reveal an exact figure but claims it's in the millions) come from the customer-generated images.
Zazzle takes the idea of consumer participation (and mass customization) to a new level. Not only is there an almost infinite variety of product combinations that consumers can create on the site, but if they don't find what they like, they can add their own digital creations to the mix. "It allows people to express their creativity in digital form and then allows them to turn those into products either for themselves or for other people," explains Ram Shriram, who recently participated in a $16 million venture investment in the company with John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. (Both Shriram and Doerr were also early investors in Google.) Shriram adds, "I clearly was not just looking at it from the perspective of T-shirts and posters. I think this idea ultimately can be bigger."
Someday the culture of participation will enable not only personalized stamps but personalized fabrication of things like electronics, automobiles, and furniture. Somebody just has to figure out how to bring computer-aided design software to the masses. Maybe that can be Joe Kraus's next startup. It's not such a crazy idea. If the Web teaches us anything, it's that a lot of people out there would rather make things themselves than rely on some company (or corporate IT person, for that matter) to do it for them.
July 22, 2005 at 01:15 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink
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