Quirky brings together a community of every day inventors to come up with new ideas for products, work together to bring these ideas to life, and finally manufacture the product for sale.

The ideas that emerge from the community are usually simple solutions to every day problems: how to better clean up the cords on your desk, slice a melon, or organize your pens. But what is innovative is the glimpse it gives into a potential future of product development, one in which the innovation process is inextricably tied to actual consumers.

It works now on a small scale to produce tangible results, but how far off are we from having the ability as amateur inventors and enthusiasts of changing entire industries with crowdsourced ideas?

Check out Local Motors, the first open source car company, recently featured in a Wired story about the upcoming DIY revolution in product design. Their “Rally Fighter” has reached production and can be had for $50k. The car was designed by the 10 person company with help from a large online community of car builders and enthusiasts who helped materialize the concept art of graphic artist Sangho Kim.

As the costs of small batch manufacturing come down industries will need to adapt to a burgeoning market of local/guild producers to stay relevant to consumer needs.

An excerpt: “‘Once Baidu went public, they invested in brand advertising, something that Google has just been arrogant in their reluctance in a growing market to invest in any kind of advertising to increase their brand awareness,’ explained Harrington. ‘Baidu went into all the smaller cities and put up billboards, bus ads, and even commercials.”‘

Internet proliferation and usage differs across the world, and the online experience varies widely based on cultural factors, government and other regulatory decisions, and commercial forces. In the U.S., we see a handful of  companies branching out into new technologies and usages umbrella-style, for example, growing from a search-based model to include media technologies, social networking tools, communications functions, and even platform and user interface technologies.  We also see companies that were formerly communications (email) based wrap their arms around “Web 2.0″ features and strategies in order to stay relevant.  Baidu is doing some of this too, certainly aware of leading trends in the U.S., however they are acting in strategic consideration of limitations related to Chinese government restrictions.  The thing to keep in mind is that the Internet evolves in different ways in different parts of the world – our own “user experience” does not necessarily represent that of others.

Check out the article, though.  There are some really interesting facts about Internet usage in the PRC.

Link to a mostly readable image

From their blog, “Using the Conversation Prism , we can visualize and map the shifting landscape of social networks and micro communities to observe and conduct our initial fieldwork through digital anthropology. The process reveals everything, from measurement opportunities to participation strategies to the specific infrastructure changes necessitated by the new proactive and reactive process of engagement in the social Web.”

The recently launched Tinker.com responds to this issue. (Check out Adage coverage of the ANA Brand Innovation Conference.) Tinker is linked to users’ Twitter accounts. It compiles all of the Twitter tweets about a specific topic, brand or event, such as Apple Computers or the American Idol Finale. Tinker then filters through tweets to find only the positive remarks (excluding competitor mentions, profanity, and other negative publicity), and displays them as a stand-alone feature. Marketers can connect their Tinker display to their webpage, Facebook page, etc.

It will be interesting to see how Tinker will develop as users catch on to the trend. But despite new marketing options, I still feel like Twitter is the way to go. The internet is full of brand messages crafted by the brand, delivered to the consumer. What consumers ultimately care about (and what Twitter could provide if used correctly) are consumer messages about the brand. Imagine the possibilities if advertisers could influence users to tweet 140 character blurbs to the effect of: “This Coke is better than–,” or “The Carolina Hurricanes are the best thing that ever happened to the triangle.” How to get users to mention products in their tweets is the real challenge.

We’re a little obsessed with twitter here at W5. Mind you, we’re not obsessed with actually twittering (or “tweeting” or whatever the kids are calling it these days). We just like to talk about it, argue about its value, and post about it on this blog. (For the record: This is our seventh post that mentions twitter.)

I’m more than willing to out myself as the twitter-skeptic. It’s always seemed a bit too much about navel-gazing and not enough about actually saying something interesting. I’ve lamented its ubiquity and predicted its demise, but it keeps getting bigger and bigger. I was beginning to feel like I was alone in my twitter-phobia…like I was the old codger (at 34) who just didn’t get it.

Thankfully, I came across this video. Now I know I’m not completely alone. Enjoy.

Johan Lehrer, editor-at-large of Seed, has a great post over at The Frontal Cortex (by far, my blog of the month) detailing the differences in virtual network dynamics and real world network dynamics.

For more information about the cutting-edge academic research being conducted using these virtual networks, be sure to check out the work of James Fowler, Associate Professor of Political Science at UCSD.

Too often, the new breed of social media expert is taking tired marketing and communications methods, adding some glitter and shine, and treating new online and mobile channels as the same old stuff. I’m seeing a lot of top ten lists that talk about ROI, about how to get your message out, about avoiding the mundane. Too often companies are being told to push commercials or marketing messages to the mobile phone. Broadcast static specials or new product announcements to Facebook or Twitter.

Many of these experts/evangelists/buzz generators seem to be missing the point. The problem with all of this is that as consumers use the internet more and more in everyday life, they get savvier about being sold to. They don’t want their mobile device (be it an IPhone or netbook), Twitter account, Facebook Page, etc. to merely be a new conduit for one way information sharing. For consumers it’s about being social, about doing things together, about being awash in the matrix of information that’s out there and sipping when they want. There is one overarching piece of advice that companies should follow when establishing a presence using online user controlled channels:

Use social media as a means of having a conversation.

Don’t forget, conversations are as much about listening as they are talking. Let your consumers talk to you, express their complaints, ask questions. Use the consumer interactions as an opportunity to respond, fix customer service/product issues, and bring consumers in on the process. People are using these methods to talk to each other, when your Twitter page merely announces specials or new product launches, there is no need to follow it. If it’s a conversation you’re sharing information, receiving information, and potentially identifying issues or opportunities in the marketplace. Use social networking to show you care, to show a little of your personality. Despite what many of these experts say, allowing a little about the daily grind of your office to bleed into your online presence is a good thing. While it shouldn’t be a minute by minute recap of the user’s day, showing that real life people work for your company can really add dimension to your brand. You might just create loyal customers who tell their friends to use your products and services.

On occasions where I want to find data to support rationale for recommending an online survey methodology for a particular target I consult a number of regularly updated sources. One very helpful source, especially when the targeting is based on demographics or life stage, is the Pew Internet & American Life Project. I’ve referred to their 2005 research on Internet usage many times, but I expect to refer to their newest report on generational Internet usage in the coming weeks and months.

The report views Internet use by Howe & Strauss’ generational labels, but breaking Boomers into younger/older categories. I personally don’t like to hinge my recommendations on generational labels as I’m inclined to abstract generational definitions in favor of softer life stage and behavioral categorizations. These numbers still work as support stats for me, though, as they are largely examined by age divisions; the generational profiling is more precisely applied in their reporting of online behaviors.

I find the Pew reports to be particularly helpful in providing data on the percentages of Americans of different age groups online, and in illuminating what activities persons of each group are doing online (who is engaging in social networking? who is still using email outside of the workplace? shopping online? looking for health information?)  I do not, however, look at this source as the final authority, however, as alas, though this research seems to have been conducted appropriately and with a large sample, the respondents were engaged through landline telephone.  This may help prevent online usage bias, but the problem remains: what trade-offs do we make in choosing an online versus telephone methodology?

At this point, most of this interaction is formatted through blog response comments, which is great, but doesn’t really stretch that far beyond what newspapers are already doing in the online realm.  And as you find on newspaper websites, many comments are so biased, opinionated, or even venemous, that it really brings you down to read through them looking for additional perspective and insight.

There are some fresh and forward-thinking thoughts from readers, though.  In response to the article, “Imagining A City Without its Daily Newspaper,” reader Bill Grady comments, “Let’s keep our news organizations, but in a digital form that saves on our natural resources. Credit card companies and financial institutions are all urging their customers to go “paperless”, so why can’t the newspapers be financially viable by doing the same thing? Surely the minds of the industry can find a way to make money without the final product being on the printed page.”

Print newspapers are dying, in part because they have failed to adapt.  Information from the Pew Research Center identifies a tipping point in print versus online readership in 2008.  I certainly get my news online now, and though I have friends losing jobs in the newspaper industry and I recognize the local and civic impact, I couldn’t imagine paying for most of what I read out there.  I’ll admit my cynicism, but when I have such a hard time finding good writing and  I have to do so much work to read between the lines to inform myself, I lose respect for the writers, editors, publishers, organizations, and channels (online or print) and advertisers that presented the reporting in such a disorganized and misdirected manner.

Chris Anderson’s follow-up to The Long Tail tackles an issue I’ve been curious about for a while – the proliferation of “free” services, content and media. Citing examples such as Google, Skype, Hulu, and Twitter, Anderson seeks to explore the long-term viability of this business model and whether it’s actually that different from the way media has been disseminated for decades. (TV and radio used to be free, right?)

The book isn’t out until July, but it already seems like he’s been promoting it forever. This video has been bouncing around the interwebs since last year when he put forth his basic thesis in a Wired article. Just yesterday, a Wall Street Journal article that takes the concept a bit further.

According to work conducted at Harvard Medical School and the University of California San Diego, the how to of making friends and building social networks are coded within genes. According to Nicholas Christaskis, a medical sociologist with Harvard, “humans, like ants, assemble themselves into a ‘super organism’ with rules governing the assembly, rules that we carry with us deep in our genes.” The thought is that one’s tendency to transitivity or centrality is “significantly heritable.”

Perhaps this why I was a hall wanderer and not on the high school yearbook committee. Throughout my life my genetic background has been a prime determinant of how many friends I (will) have as well as how many of my friends are friends amongst themselves.

Such a theory lends credibility, perhaps, to the explosion of Facebook, LinkedIn, and the overall diffusion of innovation, trends, products, and like-minded long-term behavioral shifts in societal thought. According to James Fowler, a University of California political scientist, “the next step is to look for specific genes, to see if social networks can explain associations with behaviors with obesity, smoking, and depression.”

Perhaps they can predict with a pin prick the propensity of me and my friends to hop on board and buy a new Chevy.