The Wealth of Networks

I tend to zone out when I see a pages upon pages of justified, practically single-spaced text written in small font, particularly when these pages rarely, if ever, contain more than one paragraph break. So instead of digging through that dizzying clusterfuck of ten-dollar words at 4:20 in the morning just so I can find one relatively interesting passage that reminds me of something more interesting for me to ruminate on, I'm just gonna go ahead and blindly trust the first half of the wiki's four-sentence summary of what's-his-face's 34-page intro to The Wealth of Networks, that:

"Production is shifting from physical products like blue jeans, to decentralized information goods, like articles on the Internet. This gives users more power (they can publish instead of just reading), creates more opportunities for democratic participation, lowers costs for developing countries, and democratizes the creation of our culture."



Best example? You're reading one right now: blogs. Peer-created, decentralized information goods like blogs have proven to be rather useful, including very recently when journalists look[ed] to bloggers for [more information on the] Virginia Tech story, something I'm shamelessly ripping from Prerana Chhabria's blog.



Other examples include sites like Fark.com and SlashDot.org, of which I've been an RSS subscriber since the day I discovered "live" bookmarks via RSS feeds and added these feeds to this blog just for the hell of it. Sites like these are decentralized in the sense that any user--not just administrators or moderators--can sign up and submit stories, questions or links to articles and spark massive discussions about them. SlashDot focuses on "news for nerds", dealing mostly with tech subjects, including "Your Rights Online", but there's also a section for science and politics. Fark focuses on "not news", originally satirizing how news organizations publish "stories" that in reality are of no value, but have expanded to included a wide variety of cool and interesting things to read while maintaining an always-funny and (given some of the material) surprisingly intelligent community.



Sites that are wide open for discussion and rely on the contributions of others are excellent sources of discussion and quick information. The successful ones grow very quickly and in turn require powerful servers that can handle many users at once. When someone posts a new topic that points to another site for people to read and comment on, often those sites crash because they cannot keep up with the sudden spike in users--this is known as the "SlashDot effect" or being "Farked".



An extremely bandwidth-consuming event is a national tragedy, where millions of people flood the phone lines and news sites desperately seeking information about the events that unfolded and the status of their loved ones. Phone lines may overload, and news sites may crash--not Fark, however; since it already gets insane amounts traffic on a daily basis, it is much more likely to remain up during times like that. Tragedies can also take out communications, as was the case with 9/11 (many TV news feeds were in the towers, as well as a major Internet hub that feededs all of Europe) however, as you can see in the Farkives, Fark was alive and well, and users who live near Ground Zero or were lucky enough to get through to news sites were able to instantly share that information to the world.