(I've been meaning to blog this for a while, but it slipped through the cracks.)
Dan Roth says: "I'm a writer at Fortune magazine. I thought you and your readers would like this article that's in the latest edition of Fortune. The piece is entitled "The Amazing Rise of the Do-It-Yourself Economy" and talks about all the trend of consumers discovering that they can produce the goods that they want to consume. I spend some time talking about the work of Saul Griffith and the Bible of the movement, Make magazine. Here's an excerpt:
It used to be that a tinkerer like [Pez MP3 creator Pat] Misterovich could, at best, hope to sell his idea to a big company. More likely, he'd entertain friends with his Pez-sized visions. But a number of factors are coming together to empower amateurs in a way never before possible, blurring the lines between those who make and those who take. Unlike the dot-com fortune hunters of the late 1990s, these do-it-yourselfers aren't deluding themselves with oversized visions of what they might achieve. Instead, they're simply finding a way-in this mass-produced, Wal-Mart world-to take power back, prove that they can make the products that they want to consume, have fun doing so, and, just maybe, make a few dollars. "What's happened is a tremendous change in awareness," says Eric von Hippel, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and author of the recent Democratizing Innovation. "Conventional wisdom is so strong [in business] about find-a-need-and-fill-it: 'We're the manufacturers; we design products; we ask users what they need; we do it.' That has begun to crack."
Numerous currents have converged to produce this reaction. Bloggers, those do-it-yourself journalists, showed big media that the barriers to entry (like owning a printing press, say) didn't much matter. Podcasters took radio into their own hands, creating audio shows and putting them online. Amateur music producers, using software that was once the province only of major labels, invented mash-ups: combining songs into totally new ones, then giving them away or selling them. And with the advent of services like Google AdSense, which let people easily put advertising on their sites, these tinkerers could-while not vaulting themselves into Bill Gates territory-at least break even.
"Before, only the rich had access to tools and so only the rich were professionals, and the rest were amateurs," says Noah Glass, the co-founder of Odeo, which offers a free service for making, hosting, and distributing podcasts. "But now, as the creation tools have become easier to use and more freely distributed through open source, through the Internet, through awareness, more people have more access to more tools, so the whole amateur-professional dichotomy is dissolving."
Citizen engineers are taking this even further, trying their hand not just in the digital world but in the physical world too. Much as eBay transformed distribution, they're redefining design and manufacture.
Dan also says: "While Fortune articles are usually locked up behind a curtain, I've persuaded the dot-com side to open this one up to everyone."
