This year’s Netroots Nation Convention marks the launch of a bold experiment in participatory democracy.  The Netroots (i.e. the left half of the blogosphere) will use MixedInk’s collaborative writing tool to craft their very own political platform in advance of the Democratic Convention.  At two working sessions, participants will kick off the initiative by putting their best ideas and language together.

If you’re going to be there, come visit on Friday, July 18th and Saturday, July 19th, and stop by our exhibition booth!  These sessions are just the beginning of what will be an ongoing, public process that will continue in the weeks following the conference.  The final, collectively written platform will be presented to the DNC before the convention in Denver.

If you want to be involved from the beginning but won’t be at NN, sign up at MixedInk.com, and we’ll email you the URL as soon it’s launched.

We’d like to thank the folks at Netroots Nation and wmtriallawyer for helping to organize this!

This effort builds on a growing movement to use online tools to make our government more transparent, representative, and accountable.  Both Barack Obama’s campaign and the RNC have launched exciting initiatives allowing people to help shape their platforms.  Using the Barack Obama website, Democrats can organize “Platform Meetings” in their communities, during which they can discuss and then submit policy “planks,” or one- to two-sentence policy suggestions.  These planks will be reviewed by the team writing the Platform and some will likely be incorporated into the final document.

The Republican Party also has an exciting grassroots-driven platform development effort underway.  The site highlights a range of issues and enables people to submit policies and comments that will be considered by platform authors as they prepare for the convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Also along these lines, 21st Century Democrats wrote their own Alternative Democratic Platform, which is currently being circulated as a petition.

We are thrilled to see the platform-making process opened up to the public - and proud that MixedInk will be the platform used by the Netroots.  MixedInk was built to enable exactly this kind of participation, and we look forward to seeing the results of these incredible people-powered efforts!

Don’t forget to sign up if you want to be notified when you can help create the Netroots platform.

Check out this video, singing praise for tools that tap people’s knowledge - whether using prediction markets to forecast everything from election results to American Idol winners to asking the audience tough questions answer on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.  They point out that people - collectively - perform consistently better than the pundits and experts.  Our post on prediction markets makes many of the same arguments.

Based on our last test of MixedInk, we’re convinced that our 30-headed pundit did better than any individual one of us could have alone!

We just tested out the latest version of our tool, and I wanted to share the results.  The short version: the test was a success!

Last week, 30 beta testers (read: friends) used MixedInk to help write a letter to the editor explaining why Barack Obama shouldn’t choose Hillary Clinton as his VP.   (We did not select this subject on our own - we gave our participants a few topics to choose from, and this is the one where there seemed to be greatest consensus.)

Here’s what they created together:

For years, wide-eyed journalists, politicos and academics have captured people’s imagination with musings about the many ways the Internet would democratize our society.  A decade and a half after the Internet’s emergence, the anticipated transformation is certainly underway.  Media, political, and corporate institutions have begun to incorporate readers, constituents and consumers into their regular operational and decision-making processes.  However, relative to the initial projections, the pace of change isn’t fast enough – at least to the impatient ones, including us here at MixedInk!

There are a couple of reasons for this.  First, government, media, and corporations are hesitant to cede real power to their stakeholders.  News reporters and editors don’t want to be fact-checked by their readers because it threatens their perceived status as “experts.”  Politicians want complete control over their policies, platforms and messages.  Companies want to know what their consumers think, but they don’t want consumers to have a say in decision making.

This reluctance is increasingly beside the point, however.  New, more democratic norms are coming to govern the relationship between reporter and audience member, elected official and constituent, company and consumer.  This is because free markets and elections provide these institutions with an existential reason to engage citizens transparently and democratically that overrules their hesitance: doing so brings them more votes, more dollars, and more attention.

Another challenge is that the trial and error process of testing social technology takes time.  Social processes are often counter-intuitive and difficult to manipulate, so it’s hard to build web-based tools that are a natural social fit.  New online tools thrive not because they solve some previously impossible technological problem, but because they provide “elegant organization” that offers an outlet to harness people’s energy in a productive (or at least entertaining) way.  It’s difficult, if not impossible, to predict how people will interact with each other using a new tool in advance.  Thus, finding ways to ‘organize elegantly’ requires a slow process of trial and error.

In practice, this has meant that innovative media and political organizations simply try out different tools to see what works, and then, over time, others imitate the tactics that turn out to be successful.  Being currently immersed in this trial and error process, the MixedInk team is very much aware of the time it takes; the way people use our private beta site sometimes surprises us.  As a startup, however, we don’t face the same risks as those at large, prominent institutions.  If things don’t go so well for us, few people will notice.  If they fail, everyone pays attention!

There’s plenty of cause for optimism, though.  The pace of change seems to have increased within the last several years between the growth of new media and the beginnings of a shift towards more democratic user engagement among corporate, political, and media organizations.  As Vanessa mentioned in a recent post, Dell’s IdeaStorm and MyStarbucksIdea are significant innovations in the world of corporate America.  Others, like the YouTube/CNN primary debate here in the US and the UK Prime Minister’s “Ask the PM” represent the beginnings of a democratic transformation within the media and political sphere.

To continue our online democracy’s forward progress, it’s important to recognize and address the risks involved with each of these efforts, though.  Each one engaged a large, critical mass of stakeholders with an up-front promise to publich, incorporate, and respond to their input in a meaningful way.  This sudden, very public democratization of communications meant risking that users might overwhelmingly contradict each institution’s official message and branding.  Yet by capitalizing on citizens’ desire to communicate directly with decision-makers, these efforts have been quite successful.

For all of us who aim to contribute to the emerging wave of online democracy, understanding the risks that that innovators like Starbucks, Dell and CNN face can be the difference between success and failure.  Only by adequately balancing risk and reward will new social technologies and applications be able to bring our emerging online democracy to its inevitable tipping point.  In my next post, I’ll describe a few different models for engaging citizens that provide varying degrees of risk and reward, allowing institutions with a range of risk-aversion and participatory ideals to strike the balance that’s appropriate for them.

There was a great NY Tech Meetup last week that got me thinking about collective organizing. For the first time the NY Tech Meetup had a theme, “Power to the People: The Future of Organizing.” It’s exciting to see great new ideas promoting people power – and forums that uncover and celebrate their budding existence online.

It was especially appropriate that Meetup identified this as a theme, being huge innovators in the world of local, do-it-yourself organizing. For anyone who isn’t familiar with it, Meetup is a website with an elegantly simple premise: let people post an idea for a community meeting about anything – whether it’s saving the earth, starting a business, or knitting – and allow interested people in the area to attend. In hosting this event, the NY Tech Meetup (run by Scott Heiferman, the co-founder and CEO of Meetup) aimed to bring kindred spirits in the online world of organizing together.

The seeming legendary Clay Shirky was there to chat about Here Comes Everybody, “a book about organizing without organizations.” He made an interesting presentation, mostly about how much easier group action has become – and how often it’s happening these days. The simple fact that people with something in common can now find one another is a huge step. Philosopher William James once said “thinking is for doing.” Clay says “publishing is for acting,” meaning that publishing is increasingly used to gather and coordinate people.

Check out this excerpt from Clay’s book about Meetup here. He makes the point that Meetup groups can’t be organized top-down – being self-organized is key: “Though it seems funny for a service business, Meetup actually does best not by trying to do things on behalf of its users, but by providing a platform for them to do things for one another.” The book is brand new and promises to be an inspiring read. Update: Check him out on the Colbert Report…

A bunch of interesting online innovators presented at last week’s Meetup, but I was most excited about ThePoint. The Point is a brilliant new website run by Andrew Mason in Chicago that’s based on a few basic principles: (1) People want to stand up for themselves and their beliefs (2) standing up for yourself is usually a waste of time, because you’re just one person and it’s hard to be heard, and (3) people don’t want to waste their time. So he figures that people are generally being pretty rational when they skip out on standing up for themselves.

Here’s how his site solves the problem. Say you love KFC, but you want them to treat their chickens a little better. You don’t want to boycott the place by yourself, which would certainly deprive you of that deep fried goodness without much chance of sending a strong message to KFC. So you head to ThePoint, sign in to the “Tough Love for KFC” campaign:

“KFC, your chicken is so tasty. Your biscuits are so buttery. Your colonel is so regal. You’re hard not to like. But maybe you could be just a little nicer to your animals?”

And you pledge to stop eating there if KFC doesn’t adopt the suggestions of their animal welfare board only if 1,000,000 join the movement.

Now you know you won’t be forgoing those tasty morsels for naught. You can assume your actions are sure to mean something when pooled with a million like-minded souls. So ThePoint allows you to be sure the conditions exist for your actions to be meaningful.

But this tool is not confined to social movements – you can use it to make anything happen that requires cooperation. For example, you can use it to organize your neighbors to build a new community garden, only if 1,000 of them pledge $10 each to pay for it. Pretty cool. PledgeBank, a UK-based site, provides a service that’s similar to ThePoint.

This whole people-powered online revolution thing seems to have caught on in the news this week as well. There’s an interesting article in the Guardian, “People power transforms the web in next online revolution.” Like Clay’s book, the article looks at how we are going to organize ourselves “without the trappings of traditional organizations.” It talks about flash mobs - when a group of people gathers somewhere to do something random together, like smile in October Square in Belarus. Flash mobs have affected elections in Spain, Philippines, and South Korea. In China, flash mobs are staging campaigns despite 54,000 cyber police, and it seems it will soon be impossible for even the most totalitarian governments to stop people from organizing. Update 4/16/08: Check out this story about a student twittering his way out of jail in Egypt! The article also discusses Wikipedia and other movements to make information openly accessible, including the Encyclopedia of Life (about all the Earth’s species) and the Public Library of Science, an open-access journal.

At MixedInk, we certainly plan to play our part in helping folks self-organize and harness their collective power. We just came up with an exciting idea that could make our democracy a little more people powered, which we submitted to the NetSquared Mashup Contest. It’s called Government by the people. You can help us win by voting for us! Anyone can register as a NetSquared user, making them eligible to vote - the contest is being decided, appropriately, by the people.

Update 4/16/08: Check out Seth Godin’s interesting article on the power of organizing.

What are FAQs?
FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions, as you are likely already aware. What you probably also know is that the FAQ page pretty much always includes the answers to those questions, not just the questions themselves. So technically they should be called Frequently Asked Questions & Provided Answers. “FAQPA” doesn’t have the same ring to it, though, so we’ll be sticking with FAQ.

Who cares which questions are asked most frequently?
Well, you do, in theory, and we do too. The idea is that you think like other people do, more or less. So if MixedInk makes other people wonder about certain things, there’s a good chance that it makes you wonder about the same things. Instead of you and every other person with a question asking separately and us sending you each an individual response, why not save everyone the time and just gather all the questions and answers in one place?

Why spend an entire blog post on FAQs?
Good question. We just wrote the FAQs for our site, and we were so excited to share them with you! But we realized we probably ought to wait till the site launches (soon!) to do that. So this was sort of a consolation prize.

So can we at least see some of your FAQs? You promised a “sneak preview” in the title of this post.
Sure! Here’s a taste of what’s to come:

Why use MixedInk?
In order for your opinion to matter, you have to lump yourselves together with lots of other people by voting, signing a petition, going to a rally, etc. That means you have to give up control over the message you deliver. MixedInk helps you express yourselves together without losing your individual, nuanced voice. Since MixedInk is democratic, it ensures that you have more control over what you say together.

For companies, nonprofit organizations and campaigns, it can be difficult and expensive to wade through thousands of emails, blog posts, comments and phone calls to understand what stakeholders are thinking and saying. MixedInk provides a way to harness the energy, ideas, and opinions of their most passionate members, consumers, and employees.

How many people can participate in responding to a MixedInk topic at once?
In theory, there’s no limit to the number of people that can contribute at the same time.

How can the software automatically put so much text from so many people together?
It can’t - we don’t automatically assemble a collective piece of text. We just give users the tools for them to do it themselves, by working (playing, really) together.

Is it simple majority rule?
For now, yes. Later on, we’ll make it possible to see how contributors can be divided into different camps based on the opinions they express. In the meantime, any contributor who feels he or she is in the minority can set up a new topic and ask that only those with shared views participate.

Can I republish a final collective response written using MixedInk?
You certainly can - and we hope you do!

All text that is authored by a group using MixedInk is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license. That means you can republish the content as long as you mention: “This text was created by [number] people using the democratic collaborative tool at MixedInk.com. It may be republished only if accompanied by this addendum.”

If you are republishing it online, you must also include a link to the page where you found the text.

That’s all?!? You teases!
If you’re so anxious to find out more, why haven’t you signed up to be a beta tester yet?

Right. So how did you write the FAQs for MixedInk, which hasn’t launched yet, given that you don’t know which questions are actually going to be “frequently asked”?
OK, smarty pants, you got us there. We don’t know which questions will be frequently asked. We had to guess. But we’ll update the FAQs later when we find out what questions people actually ask.

Do other sites abuse the FAQs like this?
We don’t know for sure, but it sure seems like it to us. We feel lucky if half of the FAQs are remotely relevant to our concerns, so we’d bet they were also written without actually being “frequently asked.”

That doesn’t justify the practice of determining FAQs without user input, however.

If your collaborative writing software is so darn great, why don’t you just let your users write your FAQs?
Hmmmm… we hadn’t thought of that. Seems like a good idea. Maybe we’ll try that when we are fortunate enough to have users.

Other sites’ users could write the FAQs for them, too.
Another good idea – you’re full of them. Maybe we should hire you.

Where can I find your FAQs after you launch?
We’ll put them up here: http://www.mixedink.com/faq. (Note that this link will not work until we launch.)

Where should I go if I’m tired of reading this senseless drivel and actually want to learn something about FAQs?
Here’s a few sites we consulted as we constructed our FAQs:
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/faqs/about-faqs/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAQ
http://www.querycat.com/ (database of FAQs from the entire internet)

Is your blog always going to be this…playful…from now on?
Probably not. Must be the holidays

By 2012, one quarter of entertainment will have been created, edited, and shared within peer circles, rather than coming out of traditional media groups.  This is the conclusion of a global study on the future of entertainment, called “A Glimpse of the Next Episode,” conducted by Nokia and The Future Laboratory.

In carrying out the study, The Future Laboratory interviewed entertainment industry leaders as well as trend-setting consumers from 17 countries about their digital behaviors.  This was combined with Nokia’s own research from its 900 million consumers around the world to construct a global picture of entertainment over the next five years. 

Nokia termed the phenomenon Circular Entertainment, noting that people are showing “a genuine desire not only to create and share their own content, but also to remix it, mash it up and pass it on within their peer groups - a form of collaborative social media,” according to Nokia’s Multimedia Vice President Mark Selby.  Trends Director at The Future Laboratory Tom Savigar added, “Consumers are increasingly demanding their entertainment be truly immersive, engaging and collaborative.” 

At MixedInk, we have been very busy developing a collaborative writing tool to satisfy this demand.  Where blogging has enabled anyone to share their thoughts online, MixedInk is excited about making it easy and fun to remix and mash up opinions within a group to generate newer, bigger, and more compelling ideas. “Key to this evolution is consumers’ basic human desire to compare and contrast, create and communicate,” notes Savigar.  We agree.  While wikis have allowed people to write together online, we are making it easy for people to compare and contrast what many different people think – and communicate easily about those opinions. 

“Whereas the act of watching, reading and hearing entertainment was passive, consumers now and in the future will be active and unrestrained by the ubiquitous nature of circular entertainment,” says Savigar. 

MixedInk will help this expanding movement to grow.  We are motivated because we believe that an active and passionate group can create stronger, more powerful content than its individual members could produce alone.  And perhaps most importantly, we are inspired by the potential for such a platform to democratize the political arena, the media, and the workplace. 

“We believe the next episode promises to deliver the democracy politics can only dream of,” says Savigar.  We already see the beginnings of this evolution, and we look forward to playing our part in making it a reality. 

Get ready. The Next Episode will be written by you. 

Thirty family members and friends of the MixedInk team recently came together to test our software. It was very exciting to finally see MixedInk in action at this scale after much hard work and internal testing. Watching an interesting discussion take shape and participating in the eventual synergy that emerged over the five-day period was an extremely rewarding experience.

Together the participants addressed the following question: Is the US government ever justified in using torture? Why or why not?

(We chose this topic because we know people feel strongly about it. Having a topic that encourages vigorous discussion makes testing our software and concept easier).

Participants wrote, edited, and recombined responses to the topic throughout the test. With a total of 44 responses and 296 ratings in the end, the group had a vibrant brainstorming session and a fascinating exchange. Through a process of mixing and rating each other’s responses using MixedInk technology, the test participants collaboratively sculpted a collective opinion on the selected topic.

For those who are curious, we’ve pasted the text of the collective response below.

This is a major moment for MixedInk – this test provided definitive proof of our concept. We learned a ton from the test and are now tweaking old features and adding new ones based on the test and on the feedback we received. At this point, we plan to continue testing it with different and bigger groups – let us know if you’d like to help shape MixedInk by getting involved in future tests at testing@mixedink.com. We’d love to get your input!

No to Torture

In the wake of 9/11, we have begun to speak a new language. “Patriotism” means blind devotion to any government policy; to “support the troops” means to never question an interminable war; and “torture” means making the world safe for democracy. (heh, heh, heh). We are living in a world of contradictions and are facilitating it with a language of opposites. It is easier to accept an unwarranted war, corruption, and torture when they are cloaked in words like democracy, strength, and safety. But eventually we will run out of platitudes and be left with nothing but the bare truth of our actions.

Torture has fallen prey to the cover of new speak. By saying we’re protecting our way of life from terrorism, we have become terrorists ourselves and what once was abhorrent to Americans has become acceptable. The question in real speak, though, is what security do we truly gain from the use of torture? Of the multitude of tools in our security arsenal, torture is one that has been shown to fail — people will say anything to get themselves out of the situation. This is particularly true in the case of terrorism, where people are often motivated by martyrdom, and just a bit more courage as a tortured prisoner can earn a handsome payoff in the afterlife. In embracing torture as a society, we therefore lose not only our honor, but also our precious resources as we waste time and money following false leads.

Even if torture were shown to be an effective information-gathering tool, however, it still would not be a sound security policy. When we commit torture against prisoners, we place our own soldiers at great risk as we forego our authority to demand protection for them. Today other countries can easily follow our lead in playing semantic tricks to determine where the Geneva Conventions apply. If that were the case, and our soldiers were being tortured at the hands of another countrys interrogators, be sure that this discussion would need not occur; our collective outrage would be unanimous.

More importantly, we cannot discuss torture without examining what it means to be part of a society that allows it. Many claim that we need to rethink our domestic policies, and even internationally-accepted norms, given the new threats we face. We disagree. In fact, it is only at times when we are scared for our safety that we must recall the importance of our civil liberties. It is during these times that it is easiest to forgo our most important ideals for the illusion of safety and expedient answers to complex challenges.

The American justice system relies upon the idea that a person is innocent until proven guilty. And we have a very high bar for guilt; a jury must be convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt. The implicit understanding is that we, as a society, would prefer to let a guilty person go free than wrongly punish someone who is innocent. We depend upon our right to due process of law to ensure that our government does not overstep its bounds. When we allow torture of someone suspected of a crime (or suspected to be privy to critical information), we corrode this deep foundation of our country by exacting punishment based on mere suspicion. Not only does it undoubtedly lead to the torture of many people with no, or little, connection to terrorist networks, but it also leads to a dangerous temptation to blur the distinctions. And just like that, we begin down a slippery slope of disintegrating civil liberties.

Nearly everyone agrees torture is generally wrong, but there is still a great temptation to allow torture as a last resort in extreme cases. Torture, however, is not an acceptable government policy even in these scenarios. We have seen time and time again that seemingly normal people can do awful things. We saw it during Milgrim’s famous psychology experiments, we witnessed it during the Holocaust, and we stood speechless more recently when we learned of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. If we condone even a single case of torture, how will we then stop it from expanding? Who is to be the judge? Any policy that allowed torture would be subject to abuse. Enforcement is extremely difficult to imagine, given that these prisoners would be punished without the benefit of being tried in court, and an interrogator could always argue there was good reason to believe the prisoner had valuable information.

There is a short list of countries that permit torture, including Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Korea, and Uzbekistan. It is not a club that the

United States should wish to join. As we seek to remain a world leader, we must remember what it means to be American and the moral authority it could command. We should not throw it all away in exchange for nothing more than a second-rate intelligence tool. It’s time to speak clearly and realize that torture debases not only the victim but also the core of all we, in real talk, hold precious in America.

As is clear from this example, the group of our friends and family that created this lean to the political left. Note that MixedInk is emphatically nonpartisan. Our tool will be available to any group wishing to express itself together regardless of its opinion.

Until recently at Hewlett-Packard, a group of managers would sit through unending meetings to predict future prices of key computer supplies – information the company would then use to plan its purchasing strategy. Today, a prediction market at HP accomplishes the same task, but with better accuracy in far less time.

A prediction market is a stock market for ideas, where people can buy and sell “stock” in different outcomes, which impacts their relative prices. Between 1868 and 1940, prediction markets forecasted elections before advanced polling. They made a comeback in 1988, when the University of Iowa started the first electronic prediction market focused on economic and political events, such as elections.

The idea behind prediction markets is that the aggregated knowledge of diverse individuals produces a prediction with greater accuracy than a small number of experts. Diversity is critical here – if everyone starts out with the same knowledge, predictions will be the same and betting will therefore be negligible.

Though they are not infallible, prediction markets are strikingly accurate. In the 2006 Senate elections, for example, no public opinion poll predicted all 33 races correctly, but bettors at Tradesports did. Today, people use prediction markets to forecast everything from the popularity of movies to influenza outbreaks. In the corporate world, ArcelorMittal, Best Buy, General Electric, HP, Nokia, and Samsung have been using prediction markets to divine public reaction to new products, next quarter’s sales revenues, whether products will be ready on time, and future commodity prices. A comprehensive study at Intel concluded that prediction markets are at least as accurate as forecasts by Intel’s management, and often as much as 20% better.

Small companies have been slower to embrace prediction markets, but Entrepreneur.com points out that there is no reason they should miss out on the benefits. Markets can work well with relatively small groups of traders, and a small employee base can be supplemented with suppliers, vendors, and other outsiders. Small companies often seek the same answers as big corporations and can save precious time and money by replacing complicated market research with prediction markets when appropriate.

Despite all their benefits, prediction markets are only appropriate in cases where predictions are separable into neat categories: Will Microsoft release its software before November, in November, in December, in January, in February, or later than February? Will Amazon.com sell more books, iPods, or 500-thread-count sheets next month? This condition limits the prediction market’s usefulness when companies want to aggregate opinions without influencing people with a preconceived framework of possible responses or when nuanced answers would be more appropriate.

MixedInk sees prediction market software as a kindred tool. MixedInk steps in where prediction markets leave off by allowing people to respond to open-ended questions and provide more complicated answers. In addition to asking which of five products will be most popular using a prediction market, a company could use MixedInk to ask its employees to help conceive of its next innovative product or design a marketing strategy.

Using democratic, meritocratic aggregation tools like prediction markets and MixedInk, companies can truly benefit from the vast knowledge base of their employees quickly and easily. Of course, deciding to use these tools requires leaders to recognize employees’ wisdom, which can mean a big shift for some companies…but that’s a subject for another post.

Thirty-one years ago this month, a U.S. Federal Court ordered George Harrison to give up the majority of royalties from his hit song “My Sweet Lord” because he had unintentionally, subconsciously copied a Chiffons’ melody as the basis for his own song. Harrison was never accused of plagiarism, he was instead found guilty of Cryptomnesia, otherwise known as unconscious plagiarism.

Cryptomnesia is not limited to the realm of music. Carl Jung noted in a speech in 1905 that Friedrich Nietzsche’s book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” includes an almost word for word account of an incident from a book published half a century before Nietzsche’s. This is neither considered purposeful plagiarism nor pure coincidence. Nietzsche’s sister confirmed that he had indeed read the original account when he was 11 years old. Similarly, in 1916, Heinz von Lichberg published a story called “Lolita”. Forty years later Vladimir Nabokov wrote a novel by the same name, with the same plot, but to quite a bit more acclaim.

However not all cases of cryptomnesia have been of such literary import. Who could forget the episode of Seinfeld in which Elaine is ecstatic to sell a cartoon to The New Yorker only to find out she has unconsciously penned a Ziggy. From Seinfeld episode “The Cartoon”:

Jerry: You ripped off a Ziggy?

Elaine: It must’ve seeped into my subconscious, Puddy has Ziggy bed sheets.

Modern examples of this phenomenon are too numerous to list although two of the more recent, blatant examples come from pop music. Avril Lavigne’s new album includes songs sounding similar to those of seventies bands the Rubinoos and Peaches. The Red Hot Chili Peppers recent hit “Dani California” is almost a direct musical copy of Tom Petty’s “Mary Jane’s Last Dance”.

But what is the world of art, literature, music and thought without unconscious plagiarism? Of course we are all influenced by what we have seen, read and heard throughout our lives. It would be a feat of either extreme insanity or intense isolation to create a piece of content without influence or reference. This very blog post is both an intentional plagiarism of the sources linked to herein and an unintentional plagiarism of sources too numerous to even imagine.

Now here of course it should be noted that this is not an endorsement of actual, illegal, plagiarism. Passing off someone else’s work as your own is as wrong now as it ever was or ever will be. This instead is an argument for systemic change in how we use creative content as a society, which may be achieved without breaking any laws.

The internet has both increased our exposure to content and made it easier to appropriate that content for our own purposes. Many blogs have made a name for themselves by simply linking to content elsewhere on the web. The original creator may only be revealed after following a seemingly endless chain of links, some of which may take you back to where you started.

The internet has begun to enable content sharing, mash-ups and collaboration. Similarly, artists, writers and thinkers have begun to realize this shift and even embrace it in some cases. Bestselling novelist Jonathan Lethem (author of “Motherless Brooklyn” and “Fortress of Solitude”, two of my favorite books, both of which I intend to unconsciously plagiarize at some point) has launched The Promiscuous Materials Project. On the website Lethem is giving away a number of his stories and songs for users to “adapt or mutate” as they please. He also lists thirty projects in which others have created songs, stories and movies by reshaping his work.

Sharing content inevitably leads to interesting – if not superior – versions, which can even open up the original work to a larger audience. The perfect example of this is the “Grey Album”. When hip hop mogul Jay-Z released the “Black Album,” he put out a lyrics-only version in order to encourage mixing and sampling. A little known producer named Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse, fused the music from the Beatles “White Album” with lyrics from Jay-Z’s “Black Album” to create the groundbreaking “Grey Album”. Despite the fact that it was never marketed or released, Rolling Stone called it “the ultimate remix record” and Entertainment Weekly ranked it the best record of 2004. Beyond launching Danger Mouse’s career and giving Jay-Z’s album a second life, the Grey Album had the unexpected consequence of introducing a generation of hip hop fans to the Beatles.

So while it may live on in legal textbooks and high school classrooms, pseudo-plagiarism in the public realm is becoming increasingly acceptable in many circumstances. If all content is partially plagiarized then surely nothing is truly original. And if nothing is truly original then we might as well embrace sharing and collaboration as a means to a greater end. The notion that plagiarism, no matter how slight, is a crime to be prosecuted will live on through the efforts of overzealous companies and misguided artists, but hopefully, it will diminish in significance as online communities and technology work to shift the paradigm.

A number of startups are paving the way to collaborative content creation online. Jumpcut is a collaborative video production site where people can upload, remix and share their pictures and videos. MusicShake is a music mixing service that lets users create their own professional quality music using online tools. Kaltura enables users to do with video, audio, and animation what wikis have enabled them to do with text. Even the big guys are taking notice; AOL runs Ficlets, a story collaboration website and is launching a multimedia story telling service called Bluestring. And of course, our very own MixedInk intends to contribute to this space in the coming months.

The poet Audre Lorde once said, “There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.” And that really encapsulates this movement. It is not about taking someone else’s work and calling it your own. It is about taking disparate works, and changing, adding, and re-mixing them to reflect your voice, then presenting it back to the community to continue on its promiscuous path, hopefully affecting people and making itself felt along the way. In this journey, MixedInk hopes to lead the way.

The author of this post is an advisor to MixedInk.