Matt Mason: Don't Tase' Me, Guys

Matt Mason came to tell us stories of illegal activities he's been engaged in. He first took a look at the directions in which information usually flows. It used to flow one way, downward to the eyeballs. But now, it flows both ways between consumer and producer. Matt is a former pirate radio DJ, and he's written a book called the The Pirate's Dilemma. He'd look for high places (showed a slide of tall buildings) where he could broadcast from to reach as many people as possible. In the UK, pirate radio has a good-sized chunk of the "market". However, pirate radio is outside the market in an important way: while mainstream radio keeps playing the same songs over and over, pirate radio plays things that are outside the market.

When Matt noticed that the mainstream media wasn't covering the Niger/Mali famine, he put the call out for volunteer videographers to cover this story. He got an incredible number of responses and realized that there was a need for something outside the mainstream news media, and WEdia was born to get NGOs and journalists together "to bring humanitarian issues out of the shadows."

Matt wants us to deal with pirates differently. Instead of throwing lawsuit after lawsuit at pirates, we need to identify the spaces they are working in and compete with them in those spaces. In this way, pirates are great at innovation: they broaden our markets.

Posted October 10, 2007 03:20 PM by Brian Jepson | Permalink