I’ve read a few books this summer that look at non-traditional economies. Chris Anderson’s Free deals with “the future of a radical price”; Tara Hunt’s The Whuffie Factor looks at the currency of reputation; and Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody talks about the power of self-organizing systems.

Chris and Tara’s books, at their core, deal with a single concept: that a connected society has three distinct economies — money, reputation, and attention — and that businesses depend on their ability to move value between the economies. And Clay’s book shows us that these economies can emerge by themselves without formal organization.

None of these economies are new. It’s just that in an online world, we have more ways of tracking them and understanding their exchange rates. Many of today’s most interesting companies are focused on exchanging value between the three economies, giving rise to many new business opportunities and forcing us to think with a “triple bottom line” mentality.

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Chris Anderson was first a physicist, then an editor for the Economist. Now he’s the editor of Wired. He also has some interesting hobbies, including a startup based around open source airborne drones. In other words, he’s uniquely qualified to talk about how “free” is transforming the software industry.

Opening up day 2 of the SIIA Software Summit, he presented some exerpts from the forthcoming book Free: The Future of a Radical Price (quite a lot of which is outlined in a series of Wired stories.) Chris was kind enough to give me an uncorrected proof a few weeks ago, and having read that, it’s clear this will be a juggernaut of a book. Free is a disruptive idea resulting from an economy where many of our marginal costs are falling to zero.

There are few places it disrupts more than the software industry, and Chris didn’t mince words with a roomful of industry executives: “The three technologies you guys depend on are becoming too cheap to meter.”

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The panel on crowdsourcing support at the SIIA Software Summit had some great discussion on the value of community-based support systems.  Moderator Dan Woods of Evolved Media guided panelists Janjay Dholakia of Lithium, Jamie Grenney of Salesforce, Scott Hirsch of Get Satisfaction, and Mark Yolton of SAP Community Network.

Dan Woods kicked things off by talking about “Tom Sawyer wikis” — the notion that you can build a thing and expect someone else to do the work. The right thinking, it seems, is to “ask not what your community can do for you, but what you can do for your community.”

Q: How do you attract people to the community?

Mark (SAP):

In the broadest sense you have 90% consumers and 10% contributors. 1% are active. These are people who are helping others, colleagues, customers, and peers. You need something that’s going to attract people.

• In our earliest days this was content you could get nowhere else, from SAP product managers and other subject matter experts, so it was a content publishing system.
• After some time, it became the connections with other people, and the focus shifted to tools for establishing connections.
• Eventually it became a point system for ranking and thanks, which led to competition and then the focus was a reputation management system, both individually and as a company.

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Watching Judy Estrin at the SIIA Software Summit.

She thinks we’re taking innovation for granted. We’re standing on the shoulders of giants, particularly with the Internet. Breakthroughs like the Internet beget smaller innovations like the web browser; but we’re neglecting disruptive innovation and focusing on incrementals.

In a metrics-driven, measured, KPI-centric world, it’s harder to spawn massive breakthroughs because they’re more speculative and harder to justify with a priori knowledge.

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There’s lots of speculation about Twitter’s business model, from the serious to the comic. The firm’s backers claim the company has plenty of money for the long haul. In fact, given the openness Twitter has traditionally shown with its APIs, the model could be to let all of us speculate about it, then pick the winners.

But I’ll bite. I have an idea how Twitter could make money.

Most of the business models I’ve seen charge the publisher. Why not charge the audience?

We live in an attention economy. We’ve moved beyond the information economy — now, anyone can get access to anything. Instead, we want to know what’s worth our time. Google makes money by ranking information based on relevance; Paris Hilton makes money by pointing us at the scandalous; newspaper editors make money by selecting topics they think their readers will find interesting.

Lots of people are experts on things. I’d pay to follow someone smart and knowledgeable. Maybe only $10 a year, but in return, they’d search for useful information and tell me about it. They might be an expert on cloud computing, or web monitoring, or sustainable food, or transparent government. I’d follow them. I’d get links from them (which only susbscribers would receive, of course) to reports they’d written, or news they’d found.

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Montreal-based Identi.ca recently closed funding from Montrealstartup, as I wrote yesterday on GigaOm. Sometimes, when I chat with people for a story, they have a lot to say that can’t make it into the 300 or so words of a blog like GigaOm.

Here’s the transcript of the chat I had with Evan Prodromou, the company’s founder, and Daniel Drouet of MSU. Evan’s travelled and coded pretty much everywhere, and started Wikitravel; and Daniel built out the île sans fil wireless network in Montreal. They had some great insights into the future of micromessaging in general.

Bitcurrent: Why are you investing in an open source micromessaging platform, when even Twitter, a closed-source platform with millions of users, is baffled at how to make money

Daniel Drouet: Before making an investment we try to understand where the true value of a service lies. Many online services require scale to succeed, typically millions of users and page views, but we don’t think that is the case with Identica. If you look at Evan’s answer to this question Identica is much more about providing an organization or community with a platform that can be adapted to suit their needs. So it’s not about who has the most users, it’s about providing a valuable service to many smaller groups.

Evan Prodromou: I’ll answer this one, even though I shouldn’t: we’ve got commercialization options that Twitter doesn’t. Because we’re Open Source, we can do commercial, enterprise, and public Web implementations on a fee basis. Because we’re federated, we can make a hosted service that works either for public use, for private group use, or some combination of the two. Those are two places Twitter just can’t go.

Bitcurrent: Why open source?

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Wagner over at GigaOm talks of a major defection from the world of traditional Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs.) It bears some discussion.

Most MMOs involve software you install (a “fat client”) and a monthly subscription. They’re lucrative — Blizzard’s World of Warcraft is the big one, with an estimated 10 million players worldwide. There are others, like Everquest, Age of Conan, and Eve Online.

These MMOs need to keep adding content to retain users. Warcraft originally let players climb to level 60; then they added the Burning Crusade, which moved the level cap to 70. They’ll soon introduce a third patch which adds more content and takes the cap to 80. Each time, they sell new software and they change the game to make it easier to get to the higher levels, changing game dynamics.

As Wagner points out, the dynamics of the industry are changing. “Casual” MMOs like Runescape have a huge following, and start out free. They run in a browser, and they make their money wherever they can — through item purchases, advertising, and “premium” game models.

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My wife and I spend a lot of time online. The other day, I lent her my notebook for a few minutes mid-surf, and she quickly went over to Reddit. As it turns out, most of the links I’d opened were the ones she wanted to read anyway. Over at GigaOm, Om’s been reflecting on Facebook for some time now. And this got me thinking.

Surfing is increasingly a social activity. Think of news aggregators as questionnaires: “Which of these stories do you find most interesting?” If we are what we surf, then the people with whom we have the most in common are likely to have similar surfing patterns. This notion alone isn’t particularly revolutionary, and it’s driving innovation in fields like web analytics. But apply it to Facebook Connect, and it opens up a whole new realm of social networking.

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I wrote a piece a while back about how centralized computing makes a cloud a big target. I didn’t want to get into the biological origins of this stuff, but one commenter was right: Monoculture is a precursor to extinction.

In university (which seems a long, long time ago) I wrote my thesis on evolutionary theory and product life cycles. Admittedly, not a screamingly fun topic, but it did give me a chance to read up on the Burgess Shale and other such things.

Now comes word that Amazon’s EC2, by virtue of the independence it affords hosters, is being used by bad guys for nefarious misdeeds (thanks to Rachel Chalmers of The 451 for pointing it out.) This provides an additional risk: Many of the Internet’s defense mechanisms involve black-holing specific hosters when the sites they’re operating do bad things.

Of course, when you’re hosting many applications, having one of them get blacklisted can be a nuisance for all the others. What’s interesting is the back-pressure we’re seeing arise against the popularity of cloud computing: At Structure, we debated the fear of lock-in; Stacey has a great piece on enterprise obstacles to adoption; and here, we’re seeing the downside of on-demand, easy-access platforms.

In other words, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. And that doesn’t just apply to dinosaurs.

The folks from Embrase are working hard on an upcoming Startupcamp in Montreal. An impressive 27 companies have signed up already for the chance to pitch, meet, and learn. And startupcamp Montreal 1 had a total of 180 attendees.

Informal events like Barcamp and Startupcamp are great; they tend to bring together the strange and sublime alongside the polished and driven. I remember watching a scruffy developer show something, half-ashamed, apologizing for the UI and mumbling uncertainly. But what he’d built was astonishing. This kind of not-realizing-how-cool-it-is happens a lot.

I talked with organizer Phil Telio about the event. “We’re excited to have this combination of seasoned speakers, eager entrepreneurs, and startup veterans in one place,” he said. “The first event was a huge success and it’s a testament to the thriving Canadian startup community.”

I’m listed as a Guru for the event, which I think means I help judge the various pitches. Or it could be I drink too much of Montreal’s immensely-superior-to-Redbull energy drink.

Certainly, it’s become easier to build a prototype to impress. Scaling is less of an issue with on-demand components; most monitoring tools are free or near to it; transaction processing through Paypal or Google Checkout is a snap; and frameworks like Ruby and Flex make interfaces that don’t suck, even for non-designers.

The companies slated to present include:

• Vencorps, a part of powered by Cambrian House applying crowdsourcing to startups. Basically Project Greenlight incubator.
• Startyourtube, which looks like Ning-meets-Youtube. Curious to see how this is different from Youtube’s existing personalized sites.
• Camwii, a screen sharing service like Webex that reduces all the complexity of what’s being shared down to a sliding window. And I thought it was a new Nintendo gadget.
• Healthivate, which while still stealthy sounds like Healtheon-redux meets Google Health (reminds me of Marissa Mayer’s famous “I’m feeling Yucky button” joke.) Hope founder Yan Simard has read The New New Thing.
• Loyaltymatch, which seeks to unite people with excess loyalty points with those who want some. Bit of a gray market there, and many loyalty programmes put specific constraints on selling things (like flights) for money. But it’ll be interesting for another, macroeconomic reason: Claim rates on many loyalty programs are low (relying on consumer laziness and unattractive offers like restricted travel times) — disintermediating this with the Internet will change the economics of prizes and loyalty programs as claim rates climb.

Looking forward to hearing their stories, and to finding out more from the other attendees. I’m sure the guys from MTW will be there recording all the goings-on, too.