EDIT: After reading Cass Sunstein's book, which earned a four, I feel compelled to raise this to a four but Amazon does not allow me to change star ratings. This is a solid four, the preening not-withstanding. See my reviews of "Infotopia" and "Wealth of Networks" as well as "Tao of Democracy" and Pierre Levy's "Collective Intelligence" for background.

This is the quick & dirty version of Yochai Bentler's "Wealth of Networks" that is easier to read but less deep. I've read stuff by this author before and he has certainly made sustained contributions to our understanding, am just wondering if this book was a bit too quickly done--it struck me as more simplistic and shallower than I expected.

There are a number of flaws with this book that would normally take it down to three stars, but given the importance of the topic, the quick read, and the known serious past of the author, I have brought it back up to four after comparing it with "Infotopia." It is double-spaced with a heavy dose of jargon, with a very over-simplified and uncritical view of the unfettered joys of globalization. This author has evidently never heard of "true cost" or "natural capitalism."

As one who was first educated in the 1970's, I found it a real irritant to have the author appear to invent and be the catalyst for ideas like prosumer (Alvin Toffler), importance of external knowledge (Peter Drucker), and the paradigm shift (Thomas Kuhn in "The Structure of Scientific Revoltion"). The author arrogantly and jocularly says that he "Don" wrote the book on paradigm shifts. Baloney. Although the author footnotes the first two, not the third, this is in the end-notes and the sense of preening and exaggeration is distinctly annoying, especially when combined with the almost total lack of recognition of any of the 300 or so books by others about wealth of knowledge, infinite wealth, forbidden knowledge, voltaire's bastards, etc. This is a very self-centered book in more ways than one.

There are a *lot* of platitudes in this double-spaced book, to the point that I felt I was reading the Classic Comics version of the more intellectual and serious "Wealth of Networks."

Although the author mentions GoogleEarth on more than one occasion, there is not real development in this book of the importance of the geospatial foundation for sharing all information in historical and cultural context.

A few minor thoughts worth noting:

--Well-done Wikis (the author makes no mention of trolls or all the other problems associated with Wikipedia) cut email by 75% and meetings by 50%. Would that this were so, and properly documented, but its a start.

--90% of most R&D is internal and therefore lacking in the diversity that might come from the larger open network.

--top billion people are believed by some to have 2-6 spare hours a day during which they could be contributing knowledge and mentoring to the larger group.

--Bill Gates thinks that Free/Open Source Software is communist. I guess that's the equivalent of me thinking Microsoft is fascist.

--Four things I had *not* heard of: CollabNet, Scorecard, InnoCentive, and TakingITGlobal.

I am posting two customer images here to try to make the point that the world of mass collaboration is a great deal more complicated and also a great deal more exciting, than the author communicates.

Bottom line: if you are not immersed in this topic, and want one book to partly understand your kids and the emerging, this one will do, barely. It was not deep enough to fully occupy me during a five hour trip from coast to coast--take a second book as back-up.

Don Tapscott's book, Wikinomics, discussed many excellent and interesting high-level collaboration concepts but was somewhat of a disappointment because of Tapscott's "I invented the question mark" writing style. For example, Tapscott makes an attempt to label specialized networks, like Napster, as "Business Networks" and even proceeds to call them "b-webs":

"By 2000, when the music industry finally noticed it, the MP3 b-web had reached critical mass-tens of thousands of music files had become available for downloading over the Net-and Napster alone, record companies said, had cost them $300 million in lost sales."

You mean a "peer-to-peer music network?" As a management consultant by day, I even found myself rolling my eyes at some of Don's painful attempts to coin new jargon. I felt that Tapscott lost a lot of creditability by going down this path. The title alone, "Wikinomics", and the tagline, "How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything," should have given away that the consultantese was going to be thick.

Some sections of the book, like the "tagging" reference below, were just downright funny underlining that Tapscott doesn't have a very in-depth understanding of the technologies that are powering this collaboration phenomena. This suggests that Wikinomics was not edited by a broader audience:

"Tagging harnesses a technology called XML to allow users to affix descriptive labels or keyword to content (techies call it "metadata", or data about data). Wired cofounder Kevin Kelly aptly describes a tag as a public annotation-like a keyword or category name that you hang on a file, web page, or picture. When people tag content collaboratively, it creates a "folksonomy," essentially a bottom-up, organic taxonomy that organizes content on the web"

By definition, a tag does not harness XML. In fact, the two have nothing to do with each other. You could use XML to define a tag, but you could also use a database, file system metadata, or any other symbolic system to define a tag. Almost all web applications with tagging functionality store tagging data in a database system.

While this is a very small detail that Tapscott missed, this book is riddled with many of these small "misunderstandings" making me question the author's editorial process. Maybe if Tapscott had used a wiki to let others edit his transcript, a "techie" would have caught the error and corrected it ;)

Despite the nit-picky details, I would recommend the book to somebody who has never heard of a Wiki, blog, social network or of Web 2.0. It definitely gets the brain thinking about the exciting opportunities that lay ahead for both our professional and personal lives. Many interesting and innovative cases, including some new ways Proctor & Gamble is doing business outside of the traditional corporate hierarchy, are discussed in detail.

If you can stand the consultantese, have $25 laying around, and can find a couple hours to read, definitely pick up this book. If you don't have the time for the consultantese and want to understand what's really going on, pick up the Long Tail.

---
[...]

This is the best business book I've read in years, possibly ever. The Time Magazine cover story on the Person of the Year ("You" -- using the web) made me wonder where user-generated media, social networking and collaboration were headed and what their true significance would be. Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks is a thoughtful initial step, but it's often inaccessible and academic. After reading Wikinomics I now know -- this is becoming a new mode of production and Tapscott and Williams are the first to truly nail it.

It's so rare to get a true revelation from a book as most of them these days are schlock. The explanation of how the web drops collaboration costs (with thanks to Ronald Coase) is lucid and the 7 categories of new collaborative business types will bring clarity to anyone wondering how the web is changing the world.

Reading Wikinomics opened my mind to the tremendous possibilities that exist for organizations that capitalize on the mass collaboration capabilities available today. Tapscott showed multiple examples of how companies who shared their intellectual property & invited customers/peers to be co-innovators were able to:
- accelerate scientific discovery
- create new revenue streams
- reduce R&D costs
- deliver innovation faster
- lower transation costs
- tap into global source of experts
- increase efficiency
- and much more.

Not only that, this book was a real wake-up call. While I see my kids texting, IM-ing, and spending hours on [...] I never thought about the impact of these NetGen youth on our emerging workplace. If you're over 40, you need to read this book now or it'll be too late. According to the author, many traditional businesses won't survive unless they embrace these changes.

Wikinomics has challenged me to figure out how I can leverage this technology AND mindset for my own small business. I love it when a book gets me thinking!

Jill Konrath, author of Selling to Big Companies

The subtitle of the book is "How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything", and the authors do a great job covering all the latest tools and topics (e.g., wikis, Flickr, YouTube, etc.) As they see it, the four keys to success are openness, peering, sharing and acting globally. They spend the almost 300 pages of this book showing how each of these keys apply to all the various tools and platforms for collaboration.

The book is loaded with case studies, but not in the traditional (boring) sense. Rather, the authors do a nice job of weaving in examples of and interviews with collaboration pioneers from a variety of organizations. Proctor & Gamble is a popular one throughout the book. I didn't realize how much P&G does on this front till I read about it here; P&G obviously buys into the authors' suggestion that, "increasingly, you should assume the best people reside outside your corporate walls."

Here are a few other interesting excerpts I flagged while reading Wikinomics:

*** ...any serious news organization today should also allow its community of readers to join in the editorial conversation. The fact that all major media properties don't already offer a parallel front page edited by readers is troubling.

*** While the leaders fight over their "one size fits all" search engines, Alexa's Web services may lead to a customized suite of search solutions that have been developed for particular communities of interest.

*** Becoming a pervasive and continuously innovative presence means becoming a magnet for innovation that attracts lots of partners...

*** Our work may still largely define who we are, but employers no longer will.

They also devote coverage to how most publishers suffer from the good old Innovator's Dilemma, which is, of course, near and dear to my heart. One of my goals is to help ensure this statement by the authors doesn't come true: "...new business models for open content will not come from traditional media establishments, but from companies such as Google, Yahoo and YouTube."

Finally, in the middle of chapter 7, "Platforms for Participation", the authors ask a very important question: "Should open-platform orchestrators compensate the people and organizations that add value to their platforms?" Obviously many of these platforms are existing just fine without providing contributor compensation. But, I firmly believe compensation models will have to be developed before collaboration will appeal to the masses. (And yes, I realize many of these platforms already have large contributor bases today, but they still represent a very small percentage of the overall online population.)