Eric Reasons

Hey folks, I've been gathering a few videos up lately, and put them together in a little playlist over on Youtube. They encapsulate some of the big-picture ideas around social media. They are the starting point for a body of evidence that the social nature of the Internet is a bigger game-changer than the printing press in human history. Enjoy, won't you?

Erick Schonfeld writes a nice piece detailing the FCC's request to Apple, Google, and AT&T to clarify why the Google Voice application was rejected from the iPhone App Store. (h/t @ajkeen ) While I share Shonfeld's views on the importance of open pipes, I can't share his cheerleading of the FCC's inquiry: "The iPhone needs to be smashed open, and the FCC is swinging the hammer." I think this is conceding victory to the iPhone in the handheld market way too early in the game. It is not some universal platform for access that we are all beholden to. The iPhone is what every product from Apple is: sleek, sexy, well designed, and easy to use. This extends well past the device itself and to the platforms and applications that support it, including the App Store. It is *not* open. To be open would go against the very fabric of what Apple is. Apple is more than a product or a platform; it's a lifestyle choice. Apple's market has always been to those peop...

Tony Bourdain on Detroit: Detroit. Where just about everything cool originated. As angry as one gets looking at block after block of abandoned row houses in Baltimore and wondering how the hell that happened, it's mind boggling to see how far Detroit has been allowed to fall. But what a truly magnificent breed of crazy-ass hardcase characters have dug in there. Of all three cities we visited, Detroit, oddly enough, even while looking the jaws of death straight in the face, remains closest to being a true culinary wonderland. This is due entirely to the successive waves of migration and immigration from all over the world, when people came to MAKE things in America -- each group bringing their own food and traditions. Detroit IS the story of America, for better -- and worse, and I think we've missed that, allowed ourselves to look away. Detroit, after all, made us who we are. Literally. A country of cars, highways, car culture, upward mobility, rock and roll, rhythm and blues, a...

The online revolution really is just that: A Revolution. For 15 years now, we've heard the phrase "The Internet Revolution" so often that it's a cliche, but most times, the authors throwing about the phrase didn't realize how right they were. They never saw this coming, and many still don't. The hype about social media today sounds just like the hype about "multimedia" of 15 years ago. Is multimedia huge? Absolutely! So much so that it's practically ubiquitous today, and we don't even need to reference it as it's own entity anymore. Social media (and the Internet as a whole) will travel this same path. But what did we learn from multimedia and the dot-com bubble of the late 90's? The Internet has greatly increased the power of the consumer, it has greatly benefited the consumer, and it has destroyed many traditional businesses in the process. I've been obsessed with this "Innovation Deflation" for weeks now , since Jeff ...

Courtesy of Brad Stone at the New York Times : Polyphonic and similar new ventures are symptomatic of deep shifts in the music business. The major labels — Sony Music, Warner Music, EMI and Universal Music — no longer have such a firm grip on creating and selling professional music and minting hits with prime placement on the radio. Much of that has to do with the rise of the Internet as a means of promoting and distributing music. Physical album sales fell 20 percent, to 362.6 million last year, according to Nielsen, while sales of individual digital tracks rose 27 percent, to 1.07 billion, failing to compensate for the drop . Mindful of these changes, in the last few years marquee musicians like Trent Reznor, the Beastie Boys and Barenaked Ladies have created their own artist-run labels and reaped significant rewards by keeping a larger share of their revenue. Sound familiar? In an earlier post , I wrote: Every business model relying on intellectual property law (patent and copyright...

One of my favorites, Virginia Postrel, offers a solid review of Chris Anderson's new book , Free: The Future of a Radical Price in the New York Times. She just nails it: Opponents of the free-content argument too often reject the idea that free content is the future simply because they don’t want it to be true.[...] “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” Samuel Johnson said, and that attitude has had a good two-­century run. But the Web is full of blockheads, whether they’re rate-busting amateurs or professionals trawling for speaking gigs. All this free stuff raises the real standard of living, by making it ever easier for people to find entertainment, information and communication that pleases them. Business strategy, however, seeks not only to create but to capture value. Free is about a phenomenon in which almost all the new value goes to consumers, not producers. It is false to assume that no price means no value. But it is equally false to argue that value i...

Mike Masnick, CEO and Founder of Techdirt, flatters me far more than I deserve , citing my recent post, Intellectual Property and Deflation of the Knowledge Economy : The Citizen Media Law Group points us to an even better explanation of this very point, by Eric Reasons, noting that artificial scarcity is facing massive deflation. It's such a great concise way of making the point, I wish I'd thought of it: Every business model relying on intellectual property law (patent and copyright) is heading for massive deflation in our lifetimes. We've seen it with the music industry and newspapers already. The software industry is starting to feel it with the maturity of open source software, and the migration of applications to the cloud. Television, movies, and books are next. I've come to question the ability of copyright and patent law to foster innovation, but leaving that aside, the willingness of people to collaborate and share, and the tools provided for it on the interne...