“The Ten Forces that Flattened the World” in The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman has given me a context for the Web 2.0 platform and a growing understanding of the history of the internet and worldwide web. I found the analogy to panning for gold particularly salient pre dot.com bubble bust.
This historical perspective explains how this collaborative, inter-connective approach to the creation of software applications and content came into being. The book, written in November 2005, anticipates the kind of developments we are currently experiencing, for example, an environment where open-source software namely Mozilla Firefox has become the most popular browser, overtaking Internet Explorer, some three months ago (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp).
The discussion of Wikipedia just touches on some of the contemporary issues. Obviously its ‘open architecture’ can be misused, but it has facilitated a library of researched information previously unimaginable in scale. Virgil Griffith’s WikiScanner updated last year has helped to uncover controversial edits, usually by insiders in relation to their own company. The idea of IBM ‘safeguarding’ information on itself could lead to conflict-of-interest information, as seems to have been the case with organisations spanning the CIA, the Vatican and Diebold, an American supplier of voting machines and the Australian government in 2007, all accused of editing Wikipedia entries to improve their public image.
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