When did Globalization start?

"It may have been possible in the past, for things to have happened in isolation, but from this time forth, the world must be seen as an organic whole, everything affects everything."

Polibius
born circa 200, died circa 118BC
Megalopolis, Greece

If you have the opportunity to assist to a presentation from Gerd Leonhard, do not miss the opportunity. This quote from 2000 years ago was commented yesterday during his presentation (The Future of Content: Free, Shared...Paid?) at FICOD 2008. 

It's nice to have in Madrid a forum where you can meet in just 3 days people like Kevin Roberts (CEO Saatchi & Saatchi), Chris Anderson (Wired Magazine) and the mentioned Gerd Leonhard.

In Mr. Leonhard presentation, he talked about the present of content and his ideas of how the future will look like. He is working on his new blog-book: The End of Control. 

As a personal summary, and in my own words: 

Aiming for control is impossible. If today 6% of the users are connected to broadband, what would happen when in 3, 4 or 5 years atleast a third of the world population will have that access? What will happen when storage, already cheap today will become "cost zero" in a couple of years?

Content will be free (if it's not already free today). In order to get a part of the cake ($$), content will be the channel and surrounding activities, advertisement, items, etc.. will be what would be sold and bought. 

In short: if today a group of young artists makes teeshirts and pins in order to spread the word of their music, the "good" idea would be to do exactly the contrary: Share your music, give it away... and get the money out of selling teeshirts, pins, concerts, whatever... 

This is already happening in the music industry. It may simply be that we are not completely (or always) aware of it. It happens also in many other industries. 

Back to content localization: Gerd Leonard's speech also made me rethink of the approach on Community Translation I commented a couple of days ago. Without really being against it, I was somehow criticizing the approach. I need to rethink my statement... As De Bono says in his 10 rules of simplicity: Rule number 6: You need to be prepared to start over again.