The Age of the Pro:Am. 
It seems that we're entering a new age where amateurs are beginning
to produce work that competes and even exceeds the quality of that
produced by professionals.
This has pretty much always been the case with artists - if you're a
painter, a sculptor or even a novelist, you normally have to start out
as an amateur, pursuing your vocation as a hobby.
But this is now slowly permeating into other areas.
Blogging is an obvious one. Now we have the tools, everyone has the
potential to produce news and comment, as well as consume it. There's a
great 8 minute video here
is you haven't seen it. It's difficult to load as I suspect their
servers are a little overwhelmed. But it takes the perspective of
looking back from 2014, when the great news organisations have folded
and ordinary people generate the news and analysis.
Then we have Wired's report
of school teacher George Masters' advertisement he produced for the
iPod. Its been viewed by about 40,000 people and is generally rated as
good as anything any as agency could produce. Watch it here.
For me, there's a couple of interesting things here. Firstly, George
was able to do this without any brief from Apple. Why? Because as a
user of the product he understands everything he needs to know about
the brand, its positioning and values.
Secondly, he spent 5 months producing it, a couple of hours at a time. Think about that. 5 months producing something he wasn't getting paid for and he probably thought would be seen by about 10 people.
If you can make your brand users as passionate as this about your
product, the world really will beat a path to your door. Not only will
they create a powerful word of mouth marketing campaign, they'll even
produce your advertising for you!
I expect that this trend of the Pro:Am will continue and next on the
horizon will be the music and film industries. I think short films in
particular will have a Renaissance with 1.5 billion personal screens
out there - commonly known as mobile phones. And shorts are the prefect
length for viewing on your mobile.
Anyone any ideas about other industries that might be affected? Leave a comment if you have any ideas. Don't be shy now!
[The Mobile Technology Weblog]
2:39:14 PM 
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A Project Entropia player, known as
[OE]Deathifier[base '], recently purchased the first-ever virtual island for $26,500 in an online auction. Wow. Sure,
the game features a real cash economy, meaning that Deathifier could conceivably turn this treasure into a
budding profit, but[sigma] c[base ']mon, this brings new meaning to a place called, Neverland!
