Online Communities Change the World - marketing and consumer

Impact of YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, TripAdvisor and other online communities. Why traditional advertising agencies cannot respond. Power of community opinion. New marketing models. Why online communities are trusted more than official websites or information sources. Web 2.0. Conference keynote speaker and Futurist Dr Patrick Dixon.

Intellectual copyright: many businesses will give ideas away

Future of futurists bright because future trends soon become the past. Giving away intellectual capital. Wikipedia and YouTube world. Intellectual property only has power when released and used by others. Future is about giving away knowledge and ideas. Future of universities and research institutions, future of music and music industry. How to understand future trends. Conference keynote speaker and Futurist Dr Patrick Dixon.

Dominance of Wikipedia - threat of legal action may force tightening up of editing access

Watch out for the rising star of Wikipedia which now is starting to dominate search engine results.  This co-operative information guide is astonishing not only for speed of growth but also for the fact that it is still completely open (to abuse).  Anyone in the world can go onto the site and alter any page in any way they like.  So far the anarchists have been contained by active monitoring by the rest of the community, but this kind of openness is already melting away.  It is now necessary to log in a s a registered user to create new pages, and I predict it will not be long before a series of high profile legal threats force Wikipedia to tighten up further.  The problem is sensitive when for example people write untrue things on entries for political leaders – which has happened recently.