( following on this post and clarification on obscure points)

On the IDC listserv, an update on the Social Web economic landscape, who owns what and how. Also, stepping into the discussion are a couple of entrepreneurs that offer an interesting counterpoint to the IDC, presenting the changing contours of the social web map as a "natural" phenomenon. "Creativity" has to deal with a very special a "blank page" syndrome : it is indebted to contextual economic circumstances (administration + business). The creative niche in the entertainment industry, according to the entrepreneurs, needs a "blank bill" spacetime - the bill is to be taken care of by the godfather company. Creatives don't want to be accountants, they prefer to be lion tamers, as the Monty Python points out.

I regret that the other party, the accusers, is so poor with arguments. When they claim there should be alternatives, the only example they give if that the people who did not sell (and "changed the logic of the natural phenomenon") are the very big godfather companies themselves. At no moment the fact that this idea of creativity being cut-off from expenses and adminsitration is questioned. Of course it is a very old-fashioned idea and the creator without economic concerns is seen by many by the norm. But in that specific case, creativity is oriented towards a service, so why cut it off from the management of the entreprise. On the contrary the knowledge of what is going on at the financial and administrative level might allow a economically-aware type of creativity - and that doens't have to mean that the creative people are to become business sharks.

It makes me think that some of the most interesting artists these day are those who take into their art the creation of an entreprise. Of course, the financial question is completely different, the money dripping from art institution (godfathers of their own). But that might be another debate.

Here are some extracts of the mailing-list convesation. The whole discussion on the IDC list can be read here. 

Trebor Scholz (Institute for Distributed Creativity):

GOOGLE now owns Blogger, Writely, Dodgeball, Feedburner, YouTube, and Picasa. EBay took over Stumbleupon and Skype. YAHOO snatched up Facebook, Del.icio.us, WebJay, Jumpcut, Upcoming.org, and Oddpost.

Mr. Murdoch's NEWS CORP acquired MySpace, the video and photo-sharing site PhotoBucket and the media mash up site Flektor.  It goes without saying that they already own Fox News and Fox TV, and a few good old publishing houses like Harper Collins, Daily Telgraph, The Times, New York Daily Post, The Sun, and The Australian.

Fox Interactive bought Photobucket, which is well-liked on MySpace. NewsCorp's effort is to make services on MySpace proprietary. This means that in the future, MySpacers, will not be able to plug in third party services. The goal is to create, popularize, and monetize in-house applications and then close the door to the wealth of the sociable web. Murdoch clearly does not get the sociable web as this direction will go at the expense of the teens on MySpace.

Ebay's acquisition of Stumbleupon, the web browser plug-in that allows its users to discover and rate web pages, is driven by a different impulse. Ownership of the company means access to the 2.5 million strong community using it and will help eBay to gain more exposure for their web pages, which will lead to more transactions. [...]

Burak asks if we should call it quits; good bye, Feedburner? No. How much of a chance is there for essentialist alternatives in a post-autonomy world? Today's small startup (i.e.
http://www.feedwhip.com/) will be in the pocket of one media giant or the other by next month. [...]

Charles Turner:

[...] When success has grown their company to around 30 employees (a seemingly magic number), these principals find that their project involvement stops when the contract is signed; and that they're doomed to collecting on invoices, dealing with accumulated staff overtime, etc. etc. The telepathic management techniques of a small 8-person studio have long ago failed them.

The personality of the firm has matured too much for them to take on a "managing partner", they're unhappy because their management skills are inadequate, and what they really want to do is get back into the creative parts of design. So selling the firm/studio seems like a magic bullet where they're free to move on and start over, or become eminences grises involved in only the most "creative" parts of the business. [...]

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten (Bomega.com):

Big companies are not good at innovation. They lack entrepreneurial spirit. (see this post on a story about that:
http://blog.fleck.com/2006/01/29/the-truth-behind-the-flickr-and-delicious-acquisition/)

Small entrepreneurs often lack scale and infrastructure. They are often frustrated about this and deny this fact which leads to seemingly innovative products we all love to hate.

So this is the game we all play: young entrepreneurs innovate and build companies. Big companies pay those entrepreneurs for the innovative work they did. And they pay well. If they wouldn't pay well it would be less interesting to start innovative businesses. And
since most start-ups fail the reward must be big to attract enough entrepreneurs and make up for all the failed businesses.[...]
Selling out has always been and will always be the default. It is just one of three possible exits for a start-up: bankruptcy, IPO or acquisition.

Craigslist is simply the exception that confirms the rule*.

So please DON'T delete your Feedburner account and just be happy that you witnessed a natural phenomena and congratulate the founders. Hopefully they will go and invent a new innovative company and sell that to another big company soon. [...]
 
Dmytri Kleiner (Telekommunisten, Berlin):

[...] This is aggravated by a general anti-commerce bias in the independent online media, such as art, activist and net culture mailing lists and websites, where selling stuff is seen as vulgar and off-topic, but long threads of alarm and wonder at the latest Web 2 funding round are common. Most people seem to think that Life Styles of the Rich and Online is a far more interesting topic than small independent ventures. You can all pat yourselves of the back for finding Craiglist' inspiring and interesting now that it is a highly successfully enterprise, but if Craig where here today peddling an unknown classified add business,
he would be ignored at best, chastised for irrelevant contributions more likely. Fact is even artists, activists and cultural theorists are more likely to be interested in talking about Second Life or the latest iPod than than promoting and investigating independent, non-capitalist, enterprise. This makes promotion even more difficult for unfinanced
independents.
 
Geert Lovink (nettime):

[...] I dispute that "selling out has always been and will always be the default." If that's so then the enterpreneurial culture itself has to change. You write: "It is just one of three possible exits for a start-up: bankruptcy, IPO or acquisition." That's of course nonsense.
How did all the big IT players like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google come into being? Exactly, because they did not sell out. "Craigslist is simply the exception that confirms the rule*." Then make Craigslist the rule. No that would be a massive change, no? Enterpreneurs always claim that are working on 'change'. Then why not change this rule?