Richard Laermer, author of Punk Marketing and Full Frontal PR, and the co-author of the Bad Pitch Blog, has a new book out, called 2011 TrendSpotting for the Next Decade.

My first introduction to Richard was through the Bad Pitch Blog, and from that, I  picked up Full Frontal PR. Thought it was worth a look, at the very least. I didn’t know what to expect, and almost thought it was going to be yet another dull “here’s how you should be doing PR” book. I was completely wrong, and found myself sucked into Laermer’s writing style.  He doesn’t pull any punches and is nice and direct. The way I’d want to write a book.

When I was offered a review copy of Trendspotting, I jumped on the opportunity. I was expecting the same witty pace, the same direct tone and I wasn’t disappointed. Laermer doesn’t claim to be a futurist or anything of the sort; he’s just looking at overall trends and extrapolating those trends to take a look forward at what could be coming at us in the next decade.

This book offers 77 different ways to look at the future, and a million little tips on how people can be their own trendspotter. In a Mashable Conversation, Richard says “Every time I talk to people, they ask me ‘how do i stay on top of the trends? How do I stay in front of them?’ This book will be the user manual for the people who want to do this themselves rather than listen to all these goddamned futurists out there who are putting their finger in the air and saying ‘do this!’ ‘do that!’"

A passage in the first couple of pages of the book caught my eye and felt like it summed the entire book up:

So this new book is a rambunctious and not overwhelming training manual that presents an overview of the major trends that will affect this century and explores the ways these trends will shape the global environment, technology, political life, culture and society with a small “s”.

Overall, I really enjoyed Richard’s take on what the future has to hold, and reading the book filled me with a sense of …for lack of sounding totally cheesy …. hope and excitement for the future. Like I could get up and go do anything.

I would totally recommend this to anyone who is interested in letting their mind wander through the possibilities of the future, taking a look forward, and also learning how you can stay on top of the trends. I’ll have the top 9 ways you can become a trendspotter today in the next couple of days.

There’s two ways you can get ahold of this book for free. You can either head to FreeBabyFree , and download the ebook for free.

If you prefer to have an actual book in your hands, I’ve got a book here with your name on it. All you have to do to win a copy of 2011 Trendspotting for the Next Decade is leave a comment on this post. I’ll randomly choose one commenter and you’ll have a copy on the way to you!

Richard says the future is digital. What’s the biggest trend you see coming in the future?

I’ve got some big plans for BuzzNetworker in the upcoming weeks, and I want to know if there’s anything you’d like to see.

I just received a copy of Rohit Bhargava’s latest book, “Personality not included. Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity- and How Great Brands Get It Back” that I’ve already started on. Rohit and I will be talking as soon as I get the book finished.

I’ve got an interview set up with Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos to talk about how Zappos is using social media and PR. Thanks to Tara Hunt for that connection!

Speaking of Tara, I’ll be talking to her about her new book as well.

I’ve got an interview set up with Charlene Li about Groundswell and that will happen as soon as I’ve had an opportunity to read that book as well.

Who else should I be talking to? What do you want to hear about? Who’s got a great book that I should be looking at?

What are your thoughts? Email me or leave a comment!

This isn’t for class but I am going to be dipping into “The Big Switch” by Nicholas Carr.

Of course I will start reading this after I finish the semester, launch my employer’s new website,  and start having a normal life. So it might be a few months.

Steven Weber’s “The Success of Open Source” was written from the view of a political scientist and dealt more with the community around open source than the products themselves. Weber examines the history of the open source movement early on in the book giving a good overview and history of some of the major movements in open source. While well written, the history of the open source movement wasn’t the key portion of the book in my mind. He looks in depth at the way the open source community is run and governed, as well as some of the legal and financial issues that it faces as it continues to evolve. I found Weber’s analysis of the current problems open source software faces in a legal and business sense to be fascinating and informative.

I have read multiple books that discuss the open source movement and very few talk about one of the core concepts when it comes to software, licensing. Weber examines licensing and how it impacts the various business models in the open source software movement. At first he examines the core logic of business and their approach in regards to the concept of right to use licenses, “A company typically sells to a customer the right to use software but does not transfer full ownership of the product. This is a key distinction because what is essentially a right-to-use license can and does place restrictions on what the customer may do with the software. “ (Weber, p.191) The right to use license allows a company to control the way the product is distributed and the levels that is distributed at. Businesses can scale the software and offer different pricing schemes, like Microsoft does with much of their products. Their popular Microsoft Office product has had tiered licensing for many years. Along with the ability to control the distribution and use software companies can also tie in secondary pieces to the sale such as support, consulting, installation, and customization. Weber explanation of the concepts behind licensing is usually glossed over often; I think he does an excellent job in breaking down how it works.

Weber then explains that the GPL presents challenges to conventional business logic. Because the source code is released in open source software distribution there is nobody controlling the source code and the power structure begins to switch from the company to the consumer. While this cripples traditional business principles Weber gives examples of successful approaches to the monetization of open source software. In his analysis Weber recognizes that some core business principles remain, specifically the value of the brand, “Brands and trademarks, for example, are not trivial things in complex markets in which the quality of the good or service is hard to measure without substantial investment.” (Weber, p.192) The fact that people are coming together and distributing quality software builds a brand name even if they aren’t getting money for the software. This core business value of the brand name allows these companies to either produce software that is non open source and sell it or it creates the opportunity for other value added opportunities like support, configuration, installation, etc. Even though the software is free it doesn’t mean that the staff your business may have is ready to deploy, run, and maintain the product. Weber talks about the economy of scale and how it plays into the general business model of open source, “It is almost more efficient to outsource the functions to a specialist who achieves economies of scale by performing these tasks for many companies.” (Weber, p.195) The people that are creating it are still experts in the software much like the proprietary software that these other companies create, except that they aren’t forcing the customer’s hand in having to deal with them, which I personally believe creates a better market. When we deal with one company because we HAVE to I feel that it creates bitterness in the customer and usually poor customer service from the company controlling the space. Look at the way people feel about utilities for an example. Weber illustrates these basic holdovers from traditional business well and begins to explain emerging tactics that businesses in the open source community have deployed.

While breaking down some of the different business models that companies have used during the open source movement Weber got into some techniques that I wasn’t very familiar with. One of them was the idea of commercially crippled software. Bitkeeper uses a change long that is openly available to the public in the core of their software. For the open source community they can check Bitkeeper’s website and see how the software is being used and developed. If a company wants to keep these changes out of the public’s hand they can pay for a different version that protects their development changes to the software. “The model is sometimes called commercially crippled software—if you want to use the code for commercial software development, you have to pay for the privilege.” (Weber, p.198) Along with Bitkeeper’s strategy Weber breaks down other companies such as Va Linux, Apple Computers (which was frankly shocking that they did anything with open source), IBM, SUN, and Red Hat who really used a marriage of branding and expertise to build themselves as the source for Linux.

Aside from the business changes that open source has brought on in their industry Weber examines the legal ideas of property and the protection of the product through copyrights and patents. Weber breaks down the some of the grey area in copyrights, the GPL, and patents. I think he handles the difficulties of explaining copyrights pretty well. :

The logic of copyright is linked to the distinction between “expressions” (which copyright protects) and “ideas,” which it does not. This dichotomy is often difficult to apply in practice; it has many complication and subtleties that provide a continuous stream of case law and interpretations marking out the precise boundary. Is the presentation of data in overlapping windows in a computer desktop an idea or an expression? (Weber, p.208)

When it comes to copyrights, while it protects the software on some level the distribution end becomes cloudy for the open source community, that is where the GPL steps in. The GPL helps protect and create the rules for the distribution of open source software using copyright to back their power saying they control the license and thus the distribution. (Since they ask that open source providers technically give them the copyright holding position.) Weber examines how this is all very tenuous, as the GPL has never been fully tested in the courts.

Besides some of the copyright issues, patents are also a potential problem when it comes to the legal issues of open source. Weber talks about a scenario where large corporations take open source patent holders to court. “In a software patent world, large companies have the resources to play in what becomes a strategic game of deterrence and cross-licensing between patent holders…Apart from the several largest open source software companies who could afford to contest patent litigation or buy licenses from patent holders?” (Weber, p. 215) Weber’s examination of this and the faults that patent and copyrighting have is fascinating to me and really was the core section that drew me into the book.

I feel that a lot of complex ideas are tackled in an easily understandable way in “The Success of Open Source”. \ Weber gets into subjects that are usually glossed over or are expected to be common knowledge when talking about the information economy or open source software. He writes an interesting history but more importantly he has an eye to the future and the issues that we are about to run into head on in regards to the open source movement.

I was lucky enough to meet with the Professor I will be working under for my thesis before the semester break. Overall the meeting was fruitful and encouraging, one of the bi-products of the meeting was an additional reading list for me. The first book on the list was Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.

The main theme throughout the book is mass collaboration and how it has impacted certain companies, organizations, creativity, and the importance of it. Tapscott and Williams look at companies like Boeing, Proctor and Gamble, Wikipedia, Amazon, and even the Human Genome Project in their case studies as the authors exam how these companies have used mass collaboration in their creation or changing of their business models.

There are four main points of collaboration that they address with these companies and are really the key points of the book:

• being open- be transparent in what you do
• peering- work with other people outside of your company to innovate
• sharing- be open with your work, your intellectual property, your concepts that aren’t being used properly, innovation and creation can come from that
• acting globally- talent isn’t restrained to just the US, opening your eyes to the rest of the world can help your company take great steps

How these core concepts are approached and how these companies use them provide really interesting case studies. Seeing large companies open up their intellectual property to smaller companies and individuals so they can innovate and use their specialized knowledge to create better or new products is amazing. One example a scientific research website where companies list a goal of what they want accomplished and post a reward for someone coming up with a solution. This has helped out scientists in smaller countries and people that want to launch their own businesses by allowing them to use their expertise to solve these larger problems. People are able to share solutions and discuss the problem as well, creating a community around the science.

While this book might not apply directly to social web or promotion I think that the concepts that are discussed in this book can help modify your personal approach to how you create and use content. I highly recommend reading this book, as companies adapt and begin to use various social web tools in their everyday operations this book helps provide an understanding of the concepts behind using them and why it is important.

What books have you been reading?