Rise of the Participation Culture

While at the Web 2.0 Conference Summit a couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to spend some time wth Steve Borsch whose blog, Connecting the Dots, has been a fixture in my RSS aggregator since I made his acquaintance at the Collaborative Technologies Conference earlier this year. Steve is a remarkable guy and a deep thinker - one of those people I fall into deep and meandering conversations with every chance I get.

At the Summit, Steve announced the publication of an online white paper titled The Rise of the Participation Culture. Like everything he writes, it's quite engaging and provides a good overview of many of the dynamics we're experiencing today as mobility, connectivity, and productivity collide. I highly recommend you read it.

Tonight, Steve announced that he's made a PDF version of the paper available to make it easier to disseminate. You can download a copy here.

 To give you a taste, here's a selection from the introduction:

An amazing array of Web-based applications has burst forth and a new culture is forming comprised of people participating within them. An underlying infrastructure to support these applications has emerged geared to enabling, engaging and encouraging applications to be developed, but also to enable these applications to be leveraged on a massive scale. As a result, a global culture of tech-savvy, always-on and always-connected people is enthusiastically using these new Participation Applications and are shaping our networked world in new and fundamentally profound ways.
The college graduates of 2006 have never known a time when personal computers, mobile phones, television time-shift recording and other technologies were not at their fingertips.