In yesterday's Independent, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, asked the question, "Where do blog writers find the time? Do they never go to the theatre, read books, make love?". It's a bit of a dumb article referring to the internet as, "a coffee shop for paedophiles and violent fantasists", which makes it sound like Yasmin is hanging out on some pretty freaky websites, but the central point is interesting - why blog? After all, with millions and millions of folk spending...
...hours and hours tapping away their thoughts, hopes and dreams there must be some strong motivational forces at work.
Maslow is one useful way of looking at it but the world of open source offers a complementary idea: egoboo. It's short for, "ego boost" and is used in the context of an ephemereal currency. It can be thought of as a twist on the gift economy : people do things with no obvious monetary value because they want to enhance their reputations. In open source programming there is even a sliding scale (albeit unsaid) whereby different types of activity are worth different amounts of egoboo.
Sometimes egoboo remains within the setting of a gift economy. MySpace might fall into this area, where egoboo translates as
street cred and popularity. But things get really fruity when
egoboo can be translated from a gift economy into a monetary based
world. Now, the idea of using a reputation for financial gain is as
old as the hills - just think goodwill. However, today's hyper-linked version is throwing up interesting examples - such as World of Warcraft players who build up characters to sell or Second Lifers who convert
Linden dollars for real greenbacks. And of course, people guard and foster their eBay reputations to boost their trading power.
Others call this social capital or whuffie, but egoboo is more useful in the context of modern marketing. Because these days maybe it's not the brand's reputation that's important - but the customers'.
Comments