Web 2.0's collective knowledge - good or evil?
Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political scientist, observed over 200 years ago on a trip to the newly born United States, that democracy can be as dangerous as monarchy. Beware the tyranny of the majority, he wrote. The implication was that unqualified, unfiltered participation by the general populace in matters of great import could just as easily result in the wrong laws, representatives and outcomes. Will this always be the case, he mused, or can democracy be channeled and managed?
Funny, 200 years later, that nitro-glycerin of the democratic lifestyle around the world, the Internet, is forcing some to ask similar but related questions. And Web 2.0 is heightening the pitch.
Web 2.0 is many things. For my purposes here, let's limit the discussoin to it being about soliciting the voluntary particpation of web site and application users in the otherwise expensive and time-consuming exercise of aggregation of content into massive databases. Through mass participation in the build-out of databases, the repository in question grows stronger with each user session. This is one spoke in the wheel of Web 2.0.
User-driven data building has been reported on in the last few months by Newsweek, The Economist, and all manner of Internet-based publications. And they're already asking the question: will this work in the long run or is another unforeseen bust around the corner?
The Cornucopia of the Commons: How to get volunteer labor by Dan Bricklin is an excellent source for the science and practice of volunteer participation in building powerful databases that serve all. In his words, "The central principle behind the success of the giants born in the Web 1.0 era who have survived to lead the Web 2.0 era appears to be this, that they have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence."
Other examples of the web 2.0 paradigm could include social networking site like MySpace and the professional networking site LinkedIn.
Below is a partial list of internet destinations / applications that emobdy the different eras as brainstormed in San Francisco last year at the O'Reilly-sponsored Web 2.0 Conference for technology leaders:
Web 1.0 --> Web 2.0
DoubleClick --> Google AdSense
Ofoto --> Flickr
Akamai --> BitTorrent
mp3.com --> Napster
Britannica Online --> Wikipedia
personal websites --> blogging
evite --> upcoming.org
domain name speculation --> search engine optimizationpage views --> cost per click
screen scraping --> web services
publishing --> participation
content management systems --> wikis
directories (taxonomy) --> tagging
stickiness --> syndication
But will collective-knowledge building roll along without a glitch? Thomas Jefferson cooly predicted that for the tree of democracy to survive it must from time to time be drenched with blood.
There is no predicting here. Certainly, sites like Wikipedia will continue to wrestle with the paradox of having content entered by the public at large and the problem of being credible as an authoratative source by the very same public. Does even Web 2.0 require an academic aristocracy to preserve the currrency of fact? It's difficult to know. For now, most Internet watchers with a commercial bent are saying something like,
"Data is the Next Intel Inside. Applications are increasingly data-driven. Therefore: For competitive advantage, seek to own a unique, hard-to-recreate source of data." source
Cool, but will the masses continue to be so generous with their time and so trusting of the result?
Stay tuned.