The new architecture of production
In the comments, Ryan Shaw points to the interesting MSMDX (Media Streams Metadata Exchange) project at UC Berkeley, whose goal is "to create a platform for collaboratively annotating, retrieving, sharing and remixing multimedia content.". It's just getting underway, but it has already produced one of the more cogent graphics illustrating the new architecture of participation in a remix culture.
This also suggests the start of a field guide to Long Tail producers of all sorts. Or perhaps a chapter. Hmmm.
Please do make it a chapter, you haven't found the chasm yet.
Posted by: Ross Mayfield | August 02, 2005 at 07:56 PM
I would suggest the "original creator" and "enthusiast" personas, although relevant in the AMV community, are a lot more blurred in other forms of new media - e.g. blogging, photography, writing. The AMV community still requires expensive equipment etc in order to "create", whereas with a lot of other new media virtually anyone anywhere can be a creator.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | August 03, 2005 at 04:45 PM
Richard--no doubt, there are often not clear divisions among these roles. Also, I should point out that the corners of the matrix are meant to be activities, not kinds of people. So, for example, a Flickr user might fluidly switch between creating and uploading her original media, to enthusiastically tagging and commenting on others' photos, to passively watching photos roll in on an RSS feed, to Photoshopping a CC-licensed photo that catches her eye and re-uploading it... The point of the diagram is simply to emhasize that all of these activities generate different kinds of metadata that potentially can be used to support the other activities.
Posted by: Ryan Shaw | August 04, 2005 at 08:59 AM
I've posted an updated version of my diagram, which I think corrects some of the deficiencies of the original.
Posted by: Ryan Shaw | August 15, 2005 at 06:25 PM