Q. What is jumping the shark? A. It's a moment. A defining moment when you know that your favorite television program has reached its peak. That instant that you know from now on... it's all downhill… The aforementioned expression refers to the telltale sign of the demise of H...

here is no demand for messages. The customer doesn’t want to hear from your business, thank you very much. The message that gets broadcast to you, me, and the rest of the earth’s population has nothing to do with me in particular. It’s worse than noise. It’s an interruption. I...

Jump back to the town commons for a minute. Imagine a vibrant social jumble filling the square, drawing everyone in with its buzz, diversity and wonder. There is the bazaar with small producers and craftspeople hawking their wares. In the buildings surrounding the square, ther...

A world where everybody is doing business with everybody else appears to be quite viable, if not always hugely inspired. --Derrick de Kerckhove, The Skin of Culture In the middle of the first year of the new millenium, the fact that more traditional businesses are making big o...

It takes a village to make a mall. Kevin Kelly The Internet changes the dynamics of business by relocating the marketplace squarely back in the middle of the town commons. Conversations flow from customer to customer, from vendor to customer. Some are about the weather, others...

The unexpected is the best source for inspiration. Peter Drucker Despite the commercial veneer and increasing degree of regulation it’s acquired in recent years, the Internet is still the best large-scale example of functional anarchy to come down the pipe in a long time. What...

People make the Internet. People make community. People make commonspace. No question. This being said, the tools that people use to construct commonspace matter– a lot. Why? Because the tools assemble the people, and the way they assemble them has a major impact on what we ca...

Success is nothing but being a quote. --Andy Partridge, XTC The Internet allows anyone to become a communicator of unprecedented power… or at least a communicator who gets some heartwarming recognition. Take your pick: you can be a USENET guru with answers for everything, a da...

It is truly written: the best hacks start out as personal solutions to the author’s everyday problems, and turn out to be typical for others. Eric Raymond The Cathedral and The Bazaar Why are people drawn to collective endeavours online? Why are they giving away crucial inform...

These business models presume generosity - or at least some basic drive to share. Why not? Some anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists argue that humans are hardwired for generosity, that our propensity for sharing was inherited from our primitive ancestors. The econom...

You don't invent the future, you unleash it by leveraging the global community mind. John Seely Brown, Xerox PARC Our heroes change along with our technologies. And thanks in part to the Internet, the Lone Ranger has ridden off into the sunset. Even if he hadn't, the Lone Rang...

In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked workers, people are speaking to each other in powerful new ways. Cluetrain Thesis #8 The real difference between the Internet and all preceding media forms lies in its relationship to the public. Online, people aren’t jus...

Two decades of critical thinking and breathless utopian rhetoric about the potential of online communities says volumes about commonspace. What's real and what's vapourware? Most of the existing books on the subject of online community (such as Howard Rheingold's The Virtual C...

Commonspace is a book about the people power of the Internet. It shows that the Internet isn't about dot coms, online malls or customizable coupons. It's about us. The collective us. The book was written by Mark and Darren at The Commons Group and most of it is available for f...