Giving your ‘stuff’ away is the new economy. We have moved way beyond a world of production and protection where we sell everything to consumers. Most of us now produce stuff … we share it (for free) … we consume and remix stuff from others. Here is a classic example …

A few months ago I drew this picture – it’s simply a network of how I use and visualise my knowledge flows and social media.

And then someone (Laura Pearle) spotted it on Twitter. Laura had a presentation to give at a conference about uses of social media for personal archiving and she requested to use it. “Of course” I said. So a few months later Laura sent me a link to her presentation. Check out slides 7 and 8. Laura used my picture to ask her audience a question about their own map of personal, online archiving. So my little picture has come back to me in within a context that I can now from. That’s the Gift Economy right there!