Social economic networks and the new intangibles

Social economic networks are helping to monetize the new intangibles that arise from alternative currencies such as intention, attention, time, ideas, creativity, and health data. Individuals are starting to realize that they have more assets that have economic value besides labor; multiple currencies that are starting to become monetizable.

The new currencies have new measurement metrics for monetization such as awareness, influence, authenticity, reach, action, engagement, impact, spread, connectedness, velocity, participation, shared values, and presence. As market principles become the norm for intangible resource allocation and exchange, all market agents are starting to have a more intuitive and pervasive concept of exchange and reciprocity.

Reputation has always been an important intangible asset, and was one of the first alternative currencies cited; however it was not really monetizable other than as an attribute of labor capital. Now, there are more alternative currencies, such as social currency, that are directly monetizable through social economic networks.

Real value and real assets are being created in social economic networks. For example, products and services have higher value when they are recommended. An information asset that has been generated, largely through crowd-sourced labor, is product and service recommendations. Some examples of these information resources that facilitate shopping include Amazon reviews, Yelp local business recommendations, social shopping sites (e.g.; Kaboodle, Polyvore, StyleHive, ThisNext), and product attribute discovery and dialogue sites (e.g.; Stickybits, ClickZ).

Questions uplevel the web

A new internet trend has popped up – asking questions to friends and strangers. Questions are a light-weight means of bringing structure and context to social interaction.

Many people start off with a low level of engagement (e.g.; what is the best pizza place in your neighborhood?). Things can start scaling up (e.g.; how much does it cost for a family to live in London on average?) and become quite detailed (e.g.; can a publisher see the average CPC or eCPM of a particular ad or advertiser on AdSense?). More importantly, more complex thoughts, opinion, philosophy, and value systems are being elicited (e.g.; what is a good real-world example of the "prisoner's dilemma" in recent history?).

The question-asking trend began with Hunch asking users questions to draw a taste profile map for users. The current generation of the concept features sites like Quora and formspring where users ask each other questions. Users have profiles and friending/following capability, with their questions and answer activity appearing in a status feed. It is like a friend network with topic precision.

Metrics would be interesting, such as the level of semantic complexity of questions, the number of repeated questions (an indicator of what is on the collective mind), and the ratio of asked to answered questions.

Question networks could be the real start of the semantic web, the natural automated approach (akin to Google’s automated machine learning) for creating the next higher level of information density.