Doc "Doc" Searls interviewed today for the Creative Commons:
Well, as we pointed out in Cluetrain, business is thick with the language of shipping. We have something we call "content" that we "load" into a "channel" and "address" for "delivery" to a "consumer" or an "end user." Even a category as human-oriented as customer support talks about "delivering" services…
That said, the businesses that are most afflicted with pipe-mindedness are the ones that are quickest to call everything "content." It's amazing to me that I used to be a writer, and now I'm a "content provider." Entertainment and publishing are the biggest offenders here, at least in the sense that they see the Net entirely as a plumbing system. The whole notion of a "commons" is anathema to the plumbing construct.
This was the problem with all these dot-com acronyms with a 2 in the middle — B2B, B2C and so on. "To" was the wrong preposition. As Christine Boehlke put it to me once, the correct middle letter should have been W, because in a real marketplace we do business with people not to them. Does anybody ever shake hands and say "Nice doing business to you!"? Because the Net is more fundamentally a place than a pipe, we do business with each other there, not just to each other. Critical difference.
(Thanks, Lisa!)
