In the TY Times article “In a Highly Complex World, Innovation From the Top Down“, it is argued about new trends related to Social media:
“Armed with inexpensive digital tools and networks, ordinary people can band together to push their own innovations. They also can hijack existing technologies, taking them in directions only dimly envisioned by the original creators.”
I do not thing that democracy is in open source communities and social media projects/sites, specially when it is about some business model. For example, there are plethora of 5 minutes created Web forums, but count how many of them have more than 1.000 subscribers, and of that number who has the real money from some Web discussion. Or, how many MySpace-like Web sites are successful?
When it is talked about blogs, there are the examples of very successful ones, and when you go through all of them, one thing is for sure – they can use open-source technology (like Wordpess.org), but success is very intimate category, with the mix of an unique content and the interest of blog visitors.
It can be said in marketing way, that there is no democracy in business related to open-source technology, if we have the business and revenue models based on USP (unique selling proposition) and niche markets.
