Power of Collaborative Knowledge

Information is a word that really has been a major driver towards creating history as we know it. Because of precise information, people have won wars, events, scaled ahead in life. Basically if you look at it your entire life revolves around information. You need to know things. Think back for a moment and you'll realize that there must have been a gazillion times that you might have told yourself, "I wish I knew this"! And it's true for everyone. People who possess real information have the power to rule the world. Take a very brash example at this statement. The US government is currently offering US$ 25 million for information leading directly to the conviction of Osama Bin Laden. People have been killed and people would kill for information that is sensitive.

And in this world where information can fetch such a high price, there's an entire movement that doesn't charge a penny for the information it provides, which yes might not be as sensitive as the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden, but surely enough to give competition to the regular books and magazines. I'm talking about the contributors to the wealth of collaborative knowledge.

Wikis, Blogs, Stumblers, Diggs are the new 'information service providers' at virtually no cost at all…!

Wikis – Perhaps the ultimate example of collaborative knowledge. Wikis are places where users can easily create, edit and link web-pages. These web pages are constantly fed information from various users that have the rights to edit the information available on the wiki sites. Wikipedia is the most popular wiki on earth. Just imagine, this website provides a person information which is updated, which is far more exhaustive than a Britannica Encyclopedia and is provided for free while a single set of an encyclopedia costs around $3,000…! A 300 year old brand, revered throughout the globe for its exhaustive information, ransacked and screwed royally by a start-up which is less than 10 years old. This is the power of collaborative knowledge.

And if someone thought that Wikipedia is the only wiki on the net, you're so mistaken! Private companies are now using the wiki platform for knowledge sharing within the organization!

Blogs – Another source of collaborative knowledge. This might not be on a single source site. People usually blog and post information on their own sites. But the fun starts when you start 'tagging' other blogs and add information, or comment on blogs written by others. When you 'tag' others, when you comment on other's blogs, when other blogs add a link to your blog saying that 'I read these blogs' what is happening is that you're creating virtual communities, or better still there are online columnists that are being created which debate, reason upon issues and topics. There's tremendous amount of knowledge that's being shared online which everyone can access for free! The 'editor's page' of Times of India has now a new enemy… Blogs!

Stumblers – There are like a gazillion websites on the internet, some which are full of information useful to us, and some which are just plain fun to visit. And sadly we don't know a lot of the ones that may really matter to us. Again, collaborative knowledge comes to the rescue. When half a million people come together to give you the best of the web content on the internet, you're bound to get some exotic web pages that you might have never heard of, and that's what StumbleUpon really does. It gives the user the right to tag websites under various headers (like philosophy, art, business etc.) and creates a repository of the same. Now all you have to do is install a small toolbar in your browser and you start getting the best of the websites tagged by users like you. This is something even Google can't beat. Again, power of collaborative knowledge.

There are innumerable examples like these that only prove, that two heads are better than one!