The economics of sharing
A propos of my conversation with Seb last weekend on blogs as a new form of currency, comes this Economist article about the economics of sharing in the open source tech sector and beyond:
Mr Benkler does not limit his analysis to computing and bandwidth, but tries to make a broader point in favour of sharing goods far beyond information technology. �Social sharing�, he asserts, represents �a third mode of organising economic production, alongside markets and the state.� However, with the exception of carpooling, he acknowledges he is hard-pressed to find instances where sustained sharing of valuable things is prevalent in the world outside information technology. For most goods and services, sharing will remain the exception not the rule. But Mr Benkler has identified an intriguing alternative.
