Sites that can be used for DIY design and production include Instructables and eMachine. These sites contain the resources to enable amateurs to manufacturers in their own right. The scary thing is that these sites can show anyone how to make tazers and probably even bombs. Some might say DIY sites are online schools for terrorists! Although potentially empowering, they can be downright dangerous.

 In terms of marketing via the web, new media tools such as chat rooms, discussion boards, emails, wikis, RSS feeds and blogs foster communication and can be effective for marketing purposes. Online marketing can also utilise tools such as pictures, audio, video, charts and language. New media tools also encourage collaboration which may be useful when designing and producing or produsing.

 To discuss blogs as a marketing tool, I think can they a good form of communication between people with similar interests such as influential bloggers found on sites like Technorati and Feedster. Blogs can be good for niche markets who cannot effectively advertise to a mass audience through television or newspapers. According to Denton ‘blogs are ideal for marketers who are inclined towards a PR-centric word of mouth strategy’. Blogs may be more accurate than advertisements by large organisations that are biased towards making a profit, however, there are disadvantages. Online spin can be deceptive. Marketers can use it as a strategy to create online buzz about products or brands. Open conversations amongst informed users of a product are best because they’ll collectively inform each other.

 There are a whole range of sites that are dedicated to collating opinions to bring people current and reliable information and unbiased product reviews. They rely on the collective intelligence of the produsers. Bruns refers to websites such as Epinions, Crowdstorm, Allconsuming, Stylehive, Ciao (British), Mouthshut (Indian), and Ebay. Crowdstorm has the slogan ‘Impartial buying advice from a crowd of trusted people’ which pretty much sums up the purpose of the site. Crowdstorm combines expert reviews, user reviews, buyers’ guides, thoughts, videos and questions and answers from a crowd of trusted people and sites to help users make the an informed choice when buying a product. The categories include digital cameras, video games, televisions, DVD players, tents, footwear, sleeping bags and backpacks. If you join Crowdstorm you can be part of a digital community by personalising your Crowd and your recommendations to your preferences. Members can add their own reviews, videos, comments, Q&As and you may even win prizes!

Although Web 2.0 creates a new space for creativity in the areas of DIY and marketing, I do not think that these aspects of produsage are going to change the future of humanity. Lets face it, humans will always rely on interpersonal face to face communication and there are certain things we just cannot do over the Internet.

Wikipedia was co-founded by Larry Sanger. Sanger had issues with the reliability of the Wikipedia, and in response, formed Citizendium. Sanger identified some core prinicples relating to why Wikipedia works. These are open content license, focus on the encyclopaedia, openness, ease of editing, collaborate radically, authors don’t sign articles, it offers unedited, unapproved content for further development, neutrality, it started with a core of good people, and it enjoys the Google effect. Ironically, Citizendium undermines these principles and doesn’t acknowledge the social dynamics Wikipedia does. It is much more structured, relies on reputation, and relates to professional image. Citizendium aims to be more like a traditional encyclopedia. This is obvious through the presentation of the site with its formal grey colour and sober structure.

Citizendium stresses that it is not a top down, dictatorship but rather a regularly changing group of people tasked to manage a public trust in conformity with a relatively stable code of rules. It claims to be more of a public project guided by experts.

Wikipedia is more ad-hoc and encourages equipotentiality and follows community protocols. In contrast, citizendium is based on a hierarchy using only authors and editors who are experts in their knowledge field. If you want to become an editor of Citizendium you must first submit a CV and your articles have to be approved.  This differs to Wikipedia which favours consensus over credentials.

I think Citizendium and Wikipedia are actually more similar than they appear as they both have a strong focus on amateur journalists. The key difference between them is the editorial process. The ProAm debate is based on what works and what doesn’t work and which has most to contribute: experts or amateurs? producers or produsers? hierarchies or heterarchies? taxonomies or folksonomies?

Bruns says that expert influences should be ‘organic’ members of their community rather than ‘artificially introduced foreign bodies’ and that their influence on the community is as much from an organic status of leadership rather than externally recognised expertise. Kevin Kelly’s perspective on what works is that ‘the bottom-up hive mind will never take us to our end goal. We are too impatient. So we add, design and top-down control to get to where we want to go’. I think that a balance between, and appropriate recognition of both traditional experts and community produsers is important for the future of collaborative engagement.

I conducted a search for ‘new media’ on both sites with interesting results. Wikipedia’s response was that ‘new media was in need of attention from an expert on the subject. In addition, the tone of the information they did have may not be appropriate for Wikipedia. There were no matches for ‘new media’ on Citizendium. These results indicate the immediacy of Wikipedia and show how it can act as a repository of current issues. The editorial processes of Citizendium such as submitting a CV to be an editor, may be a deterrant for participants, which can lead to a time-lag in current information updates.

Wikipedia acts a first point of reference for many people in today’s society and is perceived as one of the key drivers of the Web2.0 social software phenomenon, alongside blogs. But that doesn’t mean it is the best source of information. University lecturers do not accept Wikipedia as a credible or reliable source of information. I agree with this stance because you can’t always believe hear-say, and that’s basically what Wikipedia is. Wikipedia’s motto ‘anyone can edit’ is based on the fact that any person can participate in the editing of a Wikipedia entry and no formal qualifications or attribution are required. To me, this does little to represent its credibility. Even the actual Wikipedia entry on Wikipedia highlights the potential of Wikipedia to be unreliable and inaccurate!

Regardless of these limitations, Wikipedia is one of the most widely used websites on the Internet, with its popularity being reflected through its dominant presence within search engine results. Wikipedia with its creative collaboration and management of knowledge, is a prime example of produsage, incorporating a new value chain where the Internet is the tool of distribution, and the consumer and the producer are one in the same. I had to laugh when I came across a peculiar comparison of using Wikipedia to visiting a public restroom. “The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him”. I can totally relate to and agree with this concept, alluded to by Robert McHenry, former editor in chief of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I think that it is ok to use Wikipedia to get a general idea about something, however you should definitely follow it up with further research from more credible sources.

A similar project called Nupedia was designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias. Unlike Wikipedia, Nupedia was not a wiki, instead Nupedia depended on established experts and a traditional, editor-based content review process. Bruns states that it was this process that determined Nupedia’s ultimate failure because of the specific denial of the preconditions for produsage: trust in the equipotentiality of the contributor base, pursuit of a probalistic approach to content creation proceses, establishment of granular content creation practices, and embrace of a shared ownership of outcomes.

But what are the implications of ‘citizen’ sources for professional journalists? Since the emergence of citizen journalism earlier this century, it has been contested by professional journalists, academics, and citizens themselves. Academics Duffield and Cokley have published a book I, Journalist in defence of the journalism profession. The book argues that in a world where media professionals will be replaced by a democratised free exchange of information, a demand for the journalistic ways of thought and professional media skills stands to increase. Bruns identifies the move from gatekeeping, which utilises traditional journalistic perspectives of news judgement, to gatewatching, which involves characteristics of open participation and communal evaluation associated with produsage.

I have looked at some examples of new kinds of content being created by citizen’s such as those working with The Uptake, Global Voices and Current. The Uptake encourages users to ‘take action: become a citizen journalist’ by completing a form simple online detailing your experience and equipment. The Uptake’s slogan is ‘Will news be done by you or to you?’ This shows how news in being created in the interest of the consumers not the producers.

The Knight Citizen News Network (KCNN) learning modules for both professional and citizen journalists is an interesting initiative that I came across which is an initiative of the American University School of Communication’s (AUSOC) Centre for Social Media . The (AUSOC) led me to a recent article written by Jessica Clark , the director of the Future of Public Media Project and Pat Aufderheide. The report Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Public  shows ways that we can expand who produces and who consumes public media, and take advantage of new stakeholders such as independent media producers and engaged online communities.  The report is reviewed by Henry Jenkins, an academic and  influencial blogger in the media industry.

The article discusses identifies five user behaviours (choice, conversation, curation, creation, and collaboration) and explores how user-led digital technologies are fostering participation. Choice relates to users actively seeking out and comparing media on important issues, through search engines, recommendations, video on demand, interactive program guides, news feeds, and niche sites. Conversation relates to comment and discussion boards such as Twitter and FriendFeed managed via shared tags. Curation relates to users aggregating, sharing, ranking, tagging, reposting, juxtaposing, and critiquing content on a variety of platforms. Creation relates to users creating a range of multimedia content (audio, video, text, photos, animation, etc.) from scratch and remixing existing content. Finally, collaboration relates to users adopting a variety of new roles along the chain of media creation and distribution.

These five media habits are said to be ‘fueling exciting new trends which offer tools, platforms, or practices of enormous possibility for public media 2.0 such as Ubiquitous video , powerful databases, social networks as public forums, locative media (Mobile GPS devices), and persuasive gaming’ to name a few. Professional media makers are now tapping user-generated content as raw material for their own productions, and outlets are navigating various fair use issues as they wrestle with promoting and protecting their brands.

The previously clear cut distinction between the role of the producer and the role of the consumer are combined by a ‘user-led content production’ process (Bruns 2009, slide 3). In the digital world which exists today the concept of produsage occurs within a variety of Web 2.0 environments. For example, Wikipedia is a website which allows users to edit existing data and to add their own knowledge and information on a topic. Wikipedia is one of the most widely used websites on the Internet, and its popularity is reflected through its dominant presence within search engine results over a variety of topics. Key aspects of this user-generated medium is the freely available content and increased variety of information and knowledge from different sources. In a produsage context such as Wikipedia, a new value chain exists where the Internet is the tool of distributoin, and the consumer and the producer are one in the same.

Bruns makes a valid point that I agree with when he argues that even within the ‘Prosumer’ model, the consumer does not control the power relations as the producer is still the one making a profit and the consumer is still consuming the product that is made available to them.

Key characteristics of produsage are open participation and communal evaluation which allow for a range of people with different skills, knowledge and qualifications to contribute, rather than a closed group of producers. Fluid heterarchy and ad hoc meritocracy are characteristics of produsage which relate how participants will contribute according to their particular range of knowledge and skills. A major factor that differentiates produsage from production is the continuing process where produsage projects are continually evolving. By participating in produsage, contributors allow their knowledge to become common property and are awarded for this with status capital which is built over time through posting valued contributions.

Besides Wikipedia, there are many sites that exemplify the act of produsage emerging in various domains such as open source software development, online publishing (blogs, open news), knowledge management (wiki’s, social bookmarking), geotagging (GoogleEarth, Frappr), multi-user gaming (The Sims, EverQuest, SecondLife, Spore), media sharing and creative practice (Flickr, ccMixter, YouTube, Jumpcut, Current.tv), reviews and viral marking (Epinions, lgoUgo), and automatic aggregation (Google, Amazon, Technorati) (Bruns 2009, slide 8).

So what are the implications of all these forms of produsage existing within such an unregulated platform as the Internet where people are constantly sharing their intellectual property and building on the work of others? Well, creative commons licensing is type of copyright that allows users to mark their creative work or information and knowledge with various levels of freedom to ‘share, remix, use commercially or any combination thereof’ (Creative Commons). Creative Commons allows people to choose from different licensing conditions such as:

Attribution – which allows the copying, distribution, displaying, and performing of your copyrighted work but only if they give credit the way you request

Share Alike – where you allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work

Non-commercial – where you let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work, and derivative works based upon it, but for non-commercial purposes only

Non-Derivative Works – where you let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it