I'm still relatively new to this Web 2.0 malarkey, but something strikes me as very encouraging. The notion of a shared human brain, a shared consciousness. An article in the New York Times today illuminates the power of
Twitter to connect the people of the world. With the growth of mobile, internet-enabled, devices allowing people to "Tweet" from everywhere and anywhere, it is possible to take a "collective brain" reading.
Ideas like Jonathan Harris'
http://www.wefeelfine.org/ which collects human "feelings" from blogs. It uses a simple search function which trawls the internet looking for the two words "I feel" and then categorizes the sentences in which these words are contained. It allows a user to search different feelings. As Harris puts it in a talk at
TED, "You can search for women, who feel addicted, in their 20's, when it was cloudy, in Bangladesh."
Indeed, there is now a site called
twistori.com which does a similar thing to wefeelfine, with Tweets. The internet is a truly fascinating place and I think that there is a lot more that can and will be done with it in future.
Much maligned, Wikipedia remains a powerful and effective fact pool - somewhere to start research - how many times have you been told, "Never cite Wikipedia". That shouldn't stop you using it. It can be a great place to go from, just check the references at the bottom of the page for books to use!
I feel that the internet is yet to be truly realized as a tool for human expression and that the next five to ten years of development will be very interesting indeed!
