One big wiki

It's fair to say that the printed version of the Encyclopedia Britannica has taken something of a beating in recent years with the more accessible and free service offered by Wikipedia. Many purists of the printed format would argue that the nature of Wiki's can compromise the accuracy of information - in that due to the 'community' of editors, anyone and everyone can help make an entry. However, the ever growing list of entries to the Errors in the Encyclopedia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia page shows that both formats are rarely note perfect. Content issues aside there's no arguing over the statistics which suggest that for every page viewed on Brittanica.com, 184 pages are viewed on Wikipedia (3.8 billion v. 21 million page views per month). Even with the new service offering free content to 'web publishers' (whoever they are!) I still think that the inflexibility to completely re-work the core business model will limit the effectiveness of this new service.

The bottom line is that irrespective of what business your in, adaptability is a key factor in ensuring that you can move with the times. In digital media this is now more true than ever, with a veritable banquet of new technologies and formats available companies couldn't be blamed for being more than a little apprehensive about 'missing the boat' when it comes to adopting new tools to shape their business. As with 'Britannica Webshare' the response to emerging trends can as a consequence be a bit contrived. Solutions can be developed more out of fear change than an embracing of it.

In the creative industries there are many areas of business where being 'right brained' can be a challenge. One bonus however is that we are perhaps more accepting of changing times - testing the water, innovating and bending the rules is what makes a lot of us tick and as such there's a healthy expectation that things move on and that what was once cutting edge can become 'old hat' pretty quickly. Digital media in particular is in one of it's most exciting periods of growth with new web tools allowing previously fragmented online innovators to communicate and share ideas like never before. Of course, a lot of the 'tools' we currently use to create this networking environment (Twitter, Digg, blogs, Delicious etc) will fade away over time, but crucially the big idea of sharing will remain. Having an enthusiastic industry like this, with good dialogue between 'competitors' means that each company can have a wiki-like mentality to new trends, keeping things current and shaping disciplines to fit with their own individual business models. In the creative industries, adopting, sharing and refining is becoming part of how we work - with business models that increasingly resemble one big wiki.