This blog was originally intended to be a review of the book Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.  However it seems the muses have other ideas and it is morphing into a personal comentary on the subject they so well defined...

I will attempt to continue with the book review below but as I have moved to this peaceful cabin here on Orcas Island in Puget sound, (Pacific North West - Washington State, USA - about 30 miles south of Vancouver BC, Canada) many intuitions about  the foundation principals of our emerging global transformation have come to mind.

I find the most important principal to be aware of is our current concept of "wealth" and the emerging shift in the way value (real wealth) is exchanged.  Since the ages of old, (until the current times) currency has been used as a convenient transient system making it possible for value to be exchanged quickly regardless of each parties real value needs. 

As time went on however, (the industrial age) schemes were developed by banks to use "paper" based on the simple "promisary note" idea to create yet another veil between what represents wealth to wealth's true essence.  As a result, over time the convenience and speed of "paper transactions, and credit" and the use of these complex economic sysems has had the side effect of taking our awarness away from the true source of wealth and placing our image of value on the transient schemes used to disribute the repesentitive value of wealth in an illusive transient state.

The concept of vaporware is an interesting IT parallel to the above but that is another story alltoghther...

Over the past decade or even more... the traditional marketing mechanisms described above have increasingly become undermined by the rise of technology and mass communications.  I strongly believe that the technological / social phenomenon of mass collaboration will be successful at eventually replacing our whole system of wealth distribution making age old currency and its industrial age paper schemes obsolete....

In its place all exchange of true wealth will be a transparent process handled by an increasingly hive mind like universal consciousness that will ultimately emerge at a point when mass collaboration reaches a critical mass.  This may all sound like sci-fi but in fact its only a natural evolution and result of where we are all headed based on solid facts of where we have been and how we got to where we are today.

In my last blog of this section, I talked about my own personal historical perspective around the subject of mass collaboration, and how the birth of the Internet planted the seeds to make this all possible in a real practical way for everyone everywhere able to get in front of a computer and log in.  This possibility is increasing every day as the cost of technology continues to go down, and grass roots programs like "The $100 Laptop" continue to proliferate.

As promiced, here is a short description of some of the key concepts as they relate to mass collaboration introduced by the book Wikinomics:

• Peering

• Sharing

• Acting Globally

• Serendipitous Innovation

• IBM Transformed "and now for something completely different"

• Microsoft still doesn't get it

• Google - The first company 100% based on the new paradigm, and the most successful because of it

The Idea of the "hive mind" mentioned above and popularized by the Star Trek series gave us a good dose of the negative aspects of what mass collaboration could become.  However as with any paradigm shift we will always be fighting the age old concept of good and evil and in my opinion, it is that very challenge that helps us survive and evolve as an intelligent species. 

We see a hint of this struggle to keep mass collaboration on the right track metaphorically in the Star Trek Voyager episode  "Unimatrix Zero".  It is interesting to see parallels to the concepts illustrated in that episode within the hacker community on the Internet.  There are many within the hacker population who will actually help keep "the machine" from "turning to the dark side" so to speak...