““The question for the past decade was, Is this real?” says Yale law professor Yochai Benkler. “The question for the next half-decade is, How do you make this damned thing work?” Benkler is a leading prophet of today’s gift economy, and he fits the part: his bounteous beard resembles Kropotkin’s. He was treasurer of a kibbutz, a cooperative farm, in his native Israel. He doesn’t mind being called utopian. But neither does Benkler dream of a world without capitalism. Instead, he has become an unlikely business guru, with a shop at the intersection of Commerce and Cooperation. “It’s very cool,” he says. “I find myself talking to all sorts of weird hackers one day and chief economists of major corporations the next day, and they’re all interested in similar things.””

- Getting Rich off Those Who Work for Free - TIME

“What’s social proof? It’s the psychological term for looking for confirmation from the crowd when you’re unsure whether to act. See ten people staring up the sky and most likely you’ll stop and stare up too. Why? Social proof. Business leaders can harness the principle. A classic example is a recent program written by Colleen Szot that shattered a nearly twenty-year sales record for a home-shopping channel. Szot simply replaced the classic call to action– “Operators are waiting, please call now”– with “If operators are busy, please call again.” Rather than imagining bored operators filing their nails, home shoppers pictured phones ringing off the hook. The implicit message: others must be buying, so should you.”

- Lessons in Effective Persuasion and “Social Proof” | BNET1 | BNET

Sales and marketing are lagging in seeing the potential here [in social blogging]. When I used all these services to tell the world that my wife and I were expecting a child in September, I anticipated hearing from the world’s largest consumer-products companies begging me to try their latest diapers, food, car seats, and financial instruments. What came back? Nothing. Where was Procter & Gamble? Given what it and other companies spend acquiring new customers, there’s an untapped gold mine in Twitter and Facebook because we’re volunteering so much information about what we’re doing right now, whether it’s working on a project or eating a chicken-salad sandwich. Learning how to tap it correctly—both to sell to me directly and in seeing major trends in the millions of daily public posts—will be the next major challenge for these companies.

- The Next Email | Fast Company

Flock is a variant of the Mozilla Firefox web browser, one that comes packed with features that the social media crowd finds irresistible. On Earth Day the makers of Flock released the Eco Edition of the browser. It’s suave dark green styling is staying with the zeitgeist; you can also feel good just by using it, because

" Flock Eco-Edition donates 10% of search proceeds to the environmental charity of choice, as deemed by the voting of the community of Flock’s Eco-Edition users at the end of this year. Flock makes money when people search through the browser. So the more you search via Flock Eco-Edition, the more we’re committing to give back."

WordPress suits the purpose because it provides a person-centric way of coming online, offers an extensible architecture, and already has some features — such as an OpenID and a blogroll plugin — that can be pressed into social networking service. And its users represent exactly the sort of audience that might appreciate the permanent, public identity.

-Anne Zelenka

In the wake of Facebook’s impressive implosion, social media experts are publicly announcing their search for the Next Big Thing. The “walled-garden” business model of the Facebooks and MySpaces of the world have been exposed, and the technological elite will no longer be happy to play along as they once were.

This leaves the field open to a new generation of contenders that pride themselves on Openness and easy access to personal data. Like Ning.

Even they are but a waypoint on the road to a truly decentralized social network service, running on self-hosted servers running something like the WordPress set up Anne described above.

thinkingSage launched on this date.