The BBC has a two-part interview with Tim O'Reilly on open source — available as a transcript or podcast:
The geeks are out there on the front edge. But coming back to this idea of open source – this idea that when you put people together with the internet they start doing things in different ways and the geeks, if you like, discovered pretty early that one of the great ways that you can use the internet was you give your stuff away and it gets the word out and that was sort of the beginning of what we now call viral marketing.
Photo-sharing sites liked Flickr are examples of the participatory web
They also discovered that when you give your stuff away, you can actually get a coalition of people to help you with it and so you were able to build new forms of social organisation around projects that people care about.
(Thanks, Stuart!)
