About a year ago, the subjects of user-driven value creation and distributed amateur participation had only the beginnings of popular interest. To be fair, these ideas had already been explored aggressively by academics like Eric Von Hippel and had popped up in blog posts by pundits like Chris Anderson, but most of the popular thinking was only notes in the margins of larger and more familiar success stories. These initial successes, such as open source software development, paved the way for more modern ideas by triggering important realizations in the eyes of those that saw their ground breaking potential.

The curious success of Open Source Software Development got a lot of people wondering how they too could build software for free. A million Wikipedia entries helped us realize that fantastic content assets could be built by strangers scattered across the globe. Flickr and YouTube reminded us that content wasn’t only text. The rise of social networks like Friendster and Myspace showed that value can be in the connections as well as the content. The value in phenomena like tagging and Google’s search algorithm taught us that intelligent solutions can emerge from aggregate participation. User-driven product reviews on sites like Amazon nudged us to see that seas of people may be willing to expend valuable effort for reasons other than cold, hard cash. Posing as the poster child for The Long Tail, Amazon also created collective head-scratching around the potential of a million individually-driven niche markets and the idea of selling less of more.

Of course the list continues. Since I began writing on this topic about a year ago, several high visibility events have heralded in the age of the participant. But more on that in another post…