The power of collective intelligence

"Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library," Bush wrote, describing the personal computer only one year before the official commissioning of ENIAC, the first-ever all-electronic computer. Although ENIAC weighed 30 tons, Bush looked ahead, envisioning this future device as part of "a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture," complete with, "slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers."
Bush described with detailed examples how this device - which he calls a "memex" - will supplement human memory. "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them," he wrote, already considering their application for lawyers, physicians, and chemists for consulting not only facts and figures, but the experiences and opinions of their colleagues.
The World Wide Web has always been about sharing. Ever since Tim Berners-Lee developed the software aptly named "WorldWideWeb" in 1990 to publish information with hypertext and, in 1993, when his employer CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), declared that the WWW technology would be freely available to everyone, the gates to self-publishing swung open.
But with rudimentary, embryonic standards in place amidst rapid evolution in computer hardware, exchanging ideas and information was still limited to those with specialized knowledge.
Blogs, of course, represent sharing thoughts and expression. Podcasting could be called their first direct descendent, a kind of audio blog distributed (usually) in MP3 format for playback on a digital audio player.
The development of peer-to-peer network protocols used for KaZaa, Morpheus, and BitTorrent, combined with the irresistible temptation of getting free music, movies, and software, demonstrates the massive power of network collaboration.
In some ways the wiki actually reflects Tim Berners-Lee's original vision of the Web browser, as both a reading and writing tool.
Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia to create a fully open encyclopedia - a kind of information utopia, aggregating the knowledge of anyone who cared to participate, and providing them the authoring tools to do so. In the Wikipedia, anyone can write or edit any article about anything at anytime, without restriction. In their belief that, with sufficient critical mass, truth would arise from consensus, Sanger and Wales have attracted many believers - the Wikipedia now contains over 665,000 articles (compared to 65,000 in the 2005 Encyclopaedia Britannica).
At the center of the new sharing is Flickr, a photo-sharing site which debuted in 2002. Its concept is simple: users upload pictures and describe them with ad-hoc "tags" - basically, loose metadata.
Like the Wikipedia, what appears to be a system ripe for disarray becomes naturally structured as critical mass is reached. From chaos comes order - when you enter the tag "Paris" for your photo, Flickr itself suggests some additional tags to consider - maybe "Europe" and "France" and "tourist trap." Flickr infers its knowledge from the tags entered by every other user in the system - creating a so-called "folksonomy," a group intelligence derived by association.
The API, or Application Programming Interface, is a set of technical documentation which tells a developer how to interact with a software engine. By opening its API, Flickr shares not just the content inside its database, but how it can be used. Flickr is a triple play, sharing objects, knowledge, and resources.
With ever more sophisticated APIs and Web services being shared, attracting a critical mass of developers to build tools on those services, and a critical mass of users contributing to the services' value by aggregating shared knowledge and content, we have the makings of a truly collaborative, self-organizing platform. Viewed most optimistically, the new sharing driving today's Internet evolution could lead the way to a truly democratic network, where producers and consumers are one and the same.