Books

The Internet, far from being a mere free-porn distribution engine, allows "mass collaboration." As more and more people come online, each person is better able to find others that share niche skills. In your community, you may be one of 5 or 10 that is interested in, say open source content management system programing (like drupal, the software that runs this site). But on the Internet, you can associate with thousands of people that share that.

Pehaps the defining book describing how this technological innovation impacts culture and business is Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.

It is a slightly dated book for those of us living the tecnica vida loca, but should still be interesting for those who don't live and breathe on tech sites and philosophical treatises on technology.

As people are better able to associate and work with others who share their specialty, they are able to make unexpected breakthoughs - from esoteric scientific knowledge to the mass sorting of photos of flickr. Oh - and almost all of this is only possible because of itself. Mass collaboration created the infrastructure on which the Internet runs - from the operating systems (linux) to the server software (apache) to the databases (MySQL and Postgres) to the scripting languages (PHP and Perl) all of which are combined into the "LAMP" stack.

The implications are stunning - for instance, Scorecard allows you to learn about pollution in your community. Laws require businesses to report on pollution they emit. Historically, that would go to a government agency that would or would not do anything about it. Now the government agency puts out data feeds that are incomprensible to most people. But groups formed to deal with just this information created software to automatically categorize and update these government feeds, making it more presentable to anyone who wants to easily access the information. And no, on some sites, people can actually upload their own data to contribute to the site, making the data more accurate.

The book is filled with examples like this and will be a good read for those who have not yet grasped how everything is changing in a "The World is Flat" kinda way.