Wired's Chris Anderson has an excellent think piece on the emergence of the "peer production era." The era Anderson describes sounds, at first, like a zany mixture of futurism and Marxism, but he marshals some good evidence to support his argument. Anderson:

From Amazon.com to MySpace to craigslist, the most successful Web companies are building business models based on user-generated content. This is perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of the second-generation Web. The tools of production, from blogging to video-sharing, are fully democratized, and the engine for growth is the spare cycles, talent, and capacity of regular folks, who are, in aggregate, creating a distributed labor force of unprecedented scale.

Lest he be accused of promulgating "'60s-style utopianism," Anderson affirms that this new iteration of the Information Age is not anti-capitalist. "This isn't amateurs versus professionals," he says. "It's each benefiting the other."

In essence, the new business model has companies exploiting free labor--in the form of the guy who takes an hour out of his day to write a book review for Amazon or an entry on Wikipedia. In exchange, these companies provide users with "the tools that give voice to millions."

If, as Anderson suggests, Joe and Jill Six-pack constitute the new engine for growth, what are you doing to harness their energy? Are you giving them a voice?

[Source]: Wired