And… “The Wealth of Networks” was a great book.

Thanks for your considered reply. I’m sure you’ll be shocked to discover that I disagree. I think you’re doing more than a little cherry-picking here, both in choosing categories and in defining categories. Most important, you’re shortchanging the actual content that circulates online, which I would consider the most important factor in diagnosing the nature of production. For example, you highlight “music distribution” and “music funding,” but you ignore the music itself (the important thing), which continues to be dominated by price-incentivized production – even on p-to-p networks, the vast majority of what’s traded is music produced by paid professionals. The same goes, for example, for news reporting, where peer production is a minuscule slice of the pie. Where is the great expansion of the peer production model that you promised six years ago? The fact is, it just hasn’t happened. Even open-source software has moved away from peer production and toward price-incentivized production. I don’t say that this is necessarily a good thing, I just say that it’s the reality of what’s happening.

Here’s my (quick and dirty) alternative rundown of whether the most influential sites in major categories of online activity are generally characterized by price-incentivized production (pi) or peer production (pp):

News reporting/writing: pi (relatively little pp)

News opinion: pi (Huff Post has mix, but shifting toward more pi, both by Huff Post paid staff and for others writing as paid employees of other organizations; other popular news opinion sites are dominantly pi)

News story discovery/aggregation: unclear (are Twitter, Reddit, Stumbleupon et al. really the most influential, or are they secondary to the editorial decision-making by sites like NY Times, WSJ, BBC, Daily Mail, and other traditional papers and magazines? I don’t think this is an easy one to figure out. My own sense is that traditional news organizations play dominant role in shaping what news is seen and read online)

General (non-news) web content discovery/aggregation: pp

Blogging: pi (big change from 2006)

Other writing: pi

Music (creation): pi

Music (discovery/aggregation): difficult to say, as a lot of sites have mixed models, but I would give the edge to pi based on dominance of big retailing sites (iTunes, Amazon), big streaming sites (Spotify, Rhapsody), and artist and record company sites. Certainly since 2006, there’s been a shift toward commercial sites.

Photographs: pp

Video (creation): pi (with all due respect to YouTube amateurs, professionally produced TV shows, TV show clips, movies, movie clips, music videos, advertisements, now dominate online viewing through YouTube, Hulu, Netfllix, tv sites, newspaper sites (e.g. WSJ video), professional blog sites, etc.

Recipes: pi

Charitable giving: pi (i.e., operated by paid staff)

Reviews: pp (a big, diffuse category that could be broken up in many ways, but I think overall pp dominates in use, if not influence)

How-to advice: pi

Encyclopedias: pp

E-books: pi (that goes for even self-published e-books)

Apps: pi

Games: pi

Advertising: pi (except classified advertising, which goes pp thanks to Craigslist)

Education and training: pi

Weather: pi

Scholarship: pi

Pornography: pi (again, with all due respect to the intrepid amateurs)

The fact is that peer production hasn’t revolutionized models of content production online, even if we grant (as I do) that peer production continues to play an important (and occasionally dominant) role in some areas.

Social networking? Yes, social networking is, by definition, social networking, but even in what we define as social networking, do you really dispute that price-incentivized content is not playing an ever larger (rather than smaller) role? Here, to illustrate, are the Top 20 most popular Facebook pages as of the end of 2010 (most recent stats I could find):

1. Texas Hold’em Poker (Zynga page)
2. Facebook
3. Michael Jackson
4. Lady Gaga
5. Family Guy
6. YouTube
7. Eminem
8. Vin Diesel
9. Twilight Saga
10. Starbucks
11. Megan Fox
12. South Park
13. Coca-Cola
14. House (TV show)
15. Linkin Park
16. Barack Obama
17. Lil Wayne
18. Justin Bieber
19. Mafia Wars (Zynga)
20. Cristiano Ronaldo

Of the ten most viewed YouTube videos of all time (as of this month), nine are professional productions and only one (yes, it’s “Charlie Bit My Finger”) is a non-price-incentivized production. Even Twitter is far from a pure p-to-p site; many contributors contribute as part of their jobs. I think what we’re learning – and it’s hardly a surprise – is that when a for-profit corporation operates a social network, it becomes steadily more commercialized.

I don’t expect that I’ve convinced you that I’ve won the bet, but it sure would be nice if you would acknowledge the web’s shift, since 2006, to a medium ever more dominated by professionally produced content and ever more controlled by commercial interests, for better or for worse.