The co-production of a class blogoshpere

Of course, our class is not long enough to explore all of the aspects of e-culture or even the micro-environment of blogs, but I hope we have at least planted a few seeds that can bear fruit later. I particularly appreciate blog entries like Killiane's recent discussion of the role of the web in social responsibility in which she builds on the good work started by Thierry. Blogs have thousands of variations and thousands of good and bad qualities, but one of their strengths is this aspect of co-production.
Recall the six qualities we discussed early in the course. Generosity, the first of these qualities, is all about sharing. Sharing ideas and energy makes a big difference in what is ultimately accomplished by the class as a whole and each student individually.
Generosity is such a powerful way of opening up lines of communication that it has literally become an organizational strategy behind some of the most striking success stories in e-culture. Companies that are now capitalized in the billions of dollars, such as Google, owe their success to a simple gesture -- giving away information search services to millions of web surfers. This blogline, and all of the blogs written by the students in the class, have been written on free storage space and with free software provided by companies like Blogger.com, Bloglines, and so on. The millions of bloggers around the world are a sign of their phenomenal success and influence.
Thierry offers us another example in his discussion of Skype, a new free internet phone service. Of course, many of the examples we will find have a corporate or commercial objective in mind, especially for the long term, but this does not diminish the value of their free service. And many more examples can be found that are pure plays in the realm of e-culture generosity, free texts, references, libraries, and so on.
There is even a site for free blog vocabulary, for of those of you who are still wondering about some of these terms.