The Power of the Web 3.0 by Paul Hawken

Moore’s Law, which predicts that processing power will double in power and halve in price every 18 months, is meeting Metcalfe’s Law, which states that the usefulness of a network grows exponentially with arithmetic increases in numbers of users. These laws enable big corporations just as they do small NGOs, but the latter gain greater advantage because these new technologies amplify smallness more effectively than largeness. Large organizations don’t need networks; small ones thrive on them. Webs are complex systems of interconnected elements that link individual actions to larger grids of knowledge and movement. Web sites link to other sites with more links to other sites ad infinitum, creating a critical, fluid mass of information that evolves and grows as needed—very much like the response of our immune systems. At the heart of all of this is not technology but relationships, tens of millions of people working toward restoration and social justice.

From the book Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming (Viking). Paul Hawken is the head of the Natural Capital Institute, and author of The Ecology of Commerce, Natural Capitalism (with Amory Lovins) and other books.
taken from the article: The instinct to save the planet, appeared in Ode issue: 43

We Media final conclusions: The influence of online communities on corporate behavior.

As the Web evolves beyond 2.0, thank to open source participative software, people are finding each other online around shared interests, and although these thousands of active communities are not tangible, they are real, this is a not virtual phenomenon as many assume.
Geography is been redefined and becoming totally irrelevant as a Brazilian organic grower starts sharing real time information and content in an extremely efficient knowledge created partnership with a New Zealand farmer who shares his same passion.
This goes further than getting information from Wikipedia, it is no longer about downloading content, people are grouping in specialty communities revolutionizing decision making processes in a way it never seen before. Consumption, production and communication patterns are changing as people, influenced by others they trust online, share news, information create a collective intelligence and constructive partnerships. Since this is a web occurrence, most people are not aware of the enormous activity that is taking place online, since in our “real” world everything flows as usual, but we are about to get our heads up when Technorati will soon announce 100 million registered bloggers and MySace 200 million users online.
Since the demographics are so overwhelmingly young and the Millennials are not in power positions, we are not experiencing yet any real transformation in behavioral patterns nor corporate changes. But these adolescents, that are now partying online, will soon be making corporate, political, and consumer decisions in the real world. They are accustomed to watch little television, and since they access the news online they seldom read newspapers. They do not respond to traditional marketing campaigns or advertisers. They respond to each other. Their trendsetters are their peers on MySpace, people who they trust. Opposed to us, the boomers, they are not to be influenced by mass media, they decide for themselves.
They are accustomed to the constant exchange of ideas online; therefore corporate communications will have to change dramatically in order to dialogue with, and between, these new stakeholders.
As these increasing online communities seem to build themselves around common interests and goals, companies that want to develop relationships, will have to open up and integrate management, employee and customer blogs into a common blogosphere where product, corporate responsibility and customer information will be shared in Wiki like platforms.
Stakeholder’s active participation will probably outgrow customer reviews, and powerful new models of production and consumption will be created based on a new integration of community collaboration and self-organization.

We Media Miami conclusions (II): Participation, the end of anonymity, the demise of traditional advertising

Broadcasting and telecommunication managers initially envisioned Internet as another distribution conduit to channel more content and advertising to the rapidly growing PC user market.
It was aimed at the broadest possible audiences, those anonymous masses they already reached through their TV, Cable and Radio frequencies.
As such, Internet was initially thought as a download content distribution media and the same agencies that created advertising campaigns for corporations, cloned the simple and successful billboards into Web banners, convinced that the same business model would work.
It didn’t, as the Internet Ecommerce evolved to a Web 2.0 Me media, advertisers discovered that the same communication formula wasn’t working. The audience was different, it was not passive individual, but an active participant who actually expected companies to stop “selling” and start dialoging, who wanted companies to speak a common language, that of the participatory media. People were searching for relevant contents to be informed, to learn, but also wanted to construct a personal history, and participate. They were “uploading” and sharing personal information. And as the Millennials appeared, a new standpoint appeared regarding Web identities: the posted pictures, comments, preferences, recommendations and ranks. They tagged and linked and voted. And as the chat evolved to MSN and blogs, identities became relevant and as important as the participation itself.

Credit card numbers together with Ebay reputation and Amazon preferences evolved to information of who we are as people, our interests, in music, books, and media. Our passions, secrets and habits are increasingly shared with our MySpace friends, our new community. We entered a new era, that of We Media, an era of radical change for media companies and marketers.
As Chris Anderson states in his recently published book the Long tail & Long Tail Blog:
“Faith in advertising and the institutions that pay for it is waning, while faith in individuals is on the rise. Peers trust peers. Top-down messaging is losing traction, while bottom-up buzz is gaining power. A Company’s brand is no longer what the company says it is, but what Google says it is.”

Peer Word of Mouth is more important in the decision making process that a product advertising campaigns, as Zara the Spanish apparel company confirmed in a recent study: peer recommendations, accounted for 39% of the purchasing decision of their customers while conventional advertising only impacted in a 27%.

As Anderson points out, "remarkable democratizing forces are remarkably un-democratizing industries".

We Media is here.