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Robin Good: Back in March of 2011 Kevin Kelly wrote an interesting article entitled "The Satisfaction Paradox".
Within it, he points clearly at an emerging trend: content price becoming lower and lower, and increased ease-of-access to tons of good content, whether this may be books, music or films.
In such a new world of abundance, where valuable content is all around me, cheap and easily accessible, what is then the next value-creation frontier, he asks.
And this is the insightful view he offers: "...Netflix has more great movies a click away -- after I filter out the dross -- than I can watch in my lifetime.
What do I watch next?
Spotify and other music streaming services will have more fantastic, I-am-in-heaven music available everywhere all the time than I can ever listen to.
What do I listen to next?
Google will have every book ever published only an eight of a second away, and collaborative filtering, friends recommendations and a better Amazon engine, will narrow down those stacks to the best 10,000 books for me.
So what do I read next?
I believe that answering this question is what outfits like Amazon will be selling in the future.
For the price of a subscription you will subscribe to Amazon and have access to all the books in the world at a set price...(An individual book you want to read will be as if it was free, because it won't cost you extra.) The same will be true of movies (Netflix), or music (iTunes or Spotify or Rhapsody.) You won't be purchasing individual works.
Instead you will pay Amazon, or Netflix, or Spotify, or Google for their suggestions of what you should pay attention to next.
Amazon won't be selling books (which are marginally free); they will be selling their recommendations of what to read.
You'll pay the subscription fee in order to get access to their recommendations to the "free" works, which are also available elsewhere.
Their recommendations (assuming continual improvements by more collaboration and sharing of highlights, etc.) will be worth more than the individual books.
You won't buy movies; you'll buy cheap access and pay for personalized recommendations..."
I ask you: How close are these "recommendations" and "suggestions" to the work that many curators do?
Is curation then in the business of "what to pay attention to next"?
Must-read. 10/10
Full article: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/03/the_satsisfacti.php
