School of Everything Boing Boinged

Cory Doctorow likes School of Everything, which just launched:

[from School of Everything: eBay for knowledge - Boing Boing]

Last night, I attended the launch of School of Everything, a new web service that acts as a kind of eBay for people who have something to teach.

[…]

this is the kind of thing I mean when I give lectures about “profiting from the information economy.” Historically, the “information economy” has been assumed to be about reducing the supply of information so that only paying customers get it, and only on the terms that they pay for — for example, the record companies would like an Internet where the only music that’s available costs money, and once you buy the music, you can’t sell it again or give it away.

But School of Everything turns this on its head. The economic proposition is simple: you know something I want you to show me, and School of Everything will make it easy for us to meet and transact commerce to make this happen. It doesn’t depend on no one else being willing to do this for free, nor does it control what you do with the information once you learn it. Indeed, this is a service that benefits from the wider spreading of information: the more information there is about knitting, the more knitters there are, the more knitters there will be clamouring to learn knitting from an expert retained for this purpose. A knitting teacher doesn’t want you to hoard what you learn: she wants you to tell everyone about it.

I am equally happy with the simplicity of ‘I have something I want to learn’ matched by ‘I have something I want to teach’, and the directness of SOE’s model. [Disclosure: I serve on SOE’s advisory board.]

Here’s the Teacher profile of Paul Miller, the CEO of SOE:

Paul Miller | School of Everything, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

And my Learner’s profile (yes, I do want to learn how to can veggies):

Stowe Boyd | School of Everything, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

And I searched nearby San Francisco area looking for cool things to learn, but no one is teaching cheesemaking!

People near you | School of Everything, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

As more people join, a greater coincidensity will lead to increased likelihood that someone in the Bay Area will offer to teach mushroom foraging or one of the many other things that occurred to me that I would like to learn while I was wondering around in the site.

I also see that other ways to interact around topics of interest could enrich SOE, while keeping it close to the original vision of the founders.

I will be working with Andy Gibson, the CTO, and other folks at SOE next week, so I bet I will have more to report on my return from London.