ON IMPLICATIONS OF WIKIPEDIA GOING TO PRINT

ALL THE BLOGS FIT TO PRINT

Reading this Reuters story (via Yahoo!) on Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announcing a print version of the global poster child of "Peer Production" evoked a number of questions for me.

The article starts off with:

"Entries from Wikipedia, the popular free online encyclopedia written and edited by Internet users, may soon be available in print for readers in the developing world, founder Jimmy Wales said on Monday.

He said content from the Web site may also be burned onto CDs and DVDs so computer users in places like Africa, who lack access to high-speed Internet, could consult parts of the reference work offline."

I totally get the need to make this incredible resource to a broader range of people, and that includes folks who don't have easy access to web-connected PCs AND folks that do, but couldn't be bothered. 

But it broadens a point I'd made in a recent post entitled "On Payment for Peer Production":

"...the broader question for me is how users are eventually compensated for their "peer production" today and over time."

What is the expected compensation, if any, for the 350,000 plus people around the world, who as the article explains, have

"contributed terms, background, context or simply corrected spellings for more than 2 million Wikipedia entries in more than 25 active languages  (About 800,000 entries are in English)."

Also, what about the core 2000 contributors that make up the spine of the Wikipedia community?

How is the "compensation" for both the core and broader group to be defined?  Which of the four categories I outlined in my earlier post does this "compensation" fall under?

1. Convenient functionality for all (e.g., Flickr, Del.icio.us, Wikipedia and  of course, Google).
2. Reputation as in the case of bloggers, reviewers and commentators on the web (aka vanity).
3. Generosity, as highlighted by Tom Evslin in the discussion at the USV session.  Good example here are the mostly anonymous contributions by countless folks to entries in Wikipedia.
4. Monetary compensation direct and indirect, as in the case of eBay sellers who get direct cash from sales and Google advertisers, who presumably get transactions from the leads they pay for through Adsense and Adwords on the service and affiliates.

These questions are as much for the broader, exploding world of blogs as they are for the Wikipedia foundation.

Today, bloggers can already have their entire blogs printed out in "book" form by an emerging category of blog printers like Qoop.  These can be used for archival purposes, as gifts for friends and family, and/or to sell to readers generally.

Having recently bought a "bookified" version of John Battelle's "Searchblog", I can attest to the uniquely different blog reading experience a "blog-book" offers vs. reading it online.  Obviously, in the current print versions, one loses the richness of links in a post or an article that takes you to many more places.  Future versions may include an appendix that prints out the relevant links as well.

But it is a liberating experience to read blogs in a book...one that will increasingly be enjoyed by mainstream audiences, as blogs keep getting better and better.

Who knows?  Blog content, be it textual, or audio (podcasts) and video down the road, may offer a whole new of opportunities for traditional media, starting first with print publishers.  The aforementioned Qoop already offers the ability to print out photo albums from Web 2.0 services like Flickr and others.

In fact, what may be more relevant for mainstream readers may not be books of individual blogs, but "blog compendiums", summarizing the best blog entries in different subjects, each potentially it's own chapter or even a book.

Would you buy an annual subscription to a print version of Memeorandum, either the political or technology one?  Or even pick up an annual version to flip through a plane ride or lounging on a lazy Sunday afternoon?

These may a new paperback category of the 21st century.  Who knows, if blog-books become popular, the irony will be that we get to "b-books" before we get to "e-books".

But first we'll have to figure out the mechanisms of who gets credited and/or paid for all these off-line versions of "peer production" and how.  This may be where "payments in pennies" may truly find it's true calling.

In any case, turning Wikipedia and blog content bits into books and atoms is the right next step in evolution of digital media.