Though sounding like something out of higher maths it's much simpler: a bet between two high-profile bloggers about whether in two years (or perhaps five) people will get paid for submitting content to sites like Digg and Flickr.
On the two sides: Nicholas Carr, a former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review; and Yochai Benkler, a professor of law at Yale University whose book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, suggests that new types of collaboration let people be more productive than profit-seeking ventures.
Carr, however, thinks the lure of money will prove far more effective in finding top content pickers.
Wrote Carr (at roughtype.com), "the reason 'social media'"- such as Digg or Reddit - "has existed outside the price system up until now is that a market hadn't yet emerged for this new kind of labor. We weren't yet able to assign a value - in monetary terms - to what these workers were doing ... We couldn't see the talent for the crowd. Now, though, the amateurs are being sorted according to their individual skills, calculations as to the monetary value of those skills are starting to be made, and a market appears to be taking shape."
Benkler then challenged Carr: "We could decide to appoint between one and three people who, on some date - let's say two years from now, on August 1st 2008 - survey the web or blogosphere, and seek out the most influential sites in some major category: for example, relevance and filtration (like Digg); or visual images (like Flickr). And they will then decide whether they are peer production processes or whether they are price-incentivized systems ... I predict the major systems will be primarily peer-based."
However, that was too rushed for Carr, who responded that "two years is much too soon. We won't even have sorted out which parts of the 'social production' movement are fads and which will endure. I would think 10 years would be the real test, but 5 years should be OK - at least the trend should be apparent."
So the wager is half-on. Bookmark Carr's site for 2011. If, of course, blogging proves not just to be a fad.
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