Not all information is knowledge. A piece of information that may by valued as adding to their knowledge by one person may be counted as irrelevant by another. To be be counted as knowledge the information must have both trust and relevance. (See Wisdom)
There are many information structures on the net. Web pages, newsgroups, databases, live feeds. And more are more or less low granularity way of narrowing these down to the bits a person finds relevant - search engines, subject categorisation.
And there are plenty of first and second order ways to sort by trust. KillFiles to weed out posts by posters you do not trust. Editors who will do this for you to produce magazines.
In 10 years time, I think we will see collaborative knowledge structures (such as wikis and auto-FAQs) that have integrated third order /MediatedTrust mechanisms inbuilt being as common as wikis are now.
I think this is true, but mainly because wikis are incredibly uncommon. Only a tiny proportion of net users have even heard of the concept, and fewer still contribute. --Vitenka
2013 update. Only a tiny proportion of net users have even heard of the concept of a wiki? Boy, has that changed. :-) --DR
Not really. People know "If I search for something this place called wikipedia has the answer" and a fair chunk, if pressed, know that it's user created and untrustworthy. Know of actual wikis? Not a huge proportion. Actively use them? Tiny still. /MediatedTrust wikis? Well, there'll always be kuro5hin... --Vitenk?
Have a look at what is evolving in the PeerToPeer? space - [The Circle], [filtering apps]. I believe the speed at which people are changing apps and protocols is increasing. From irc to instant messenger, from personal web to blog. Once someone writes a kill app it won't take long for it to gain currency. --DR
In 20 years time, they will become pervasive and children will grow up using them naturally.
Um, that requires a switch to 100% net literacy in about 5 years time, and the acceptance of a switch from Google-like systems to wiki-like ones in about 10. I think either you need to postulate a WaterShed? event, or add a decade or two into the TimeLine?. --Vitenka
Pervasive does not mean every person uses it or that every country uses it. Amicog society will spread like a [Tofflerian Wave]. In those countries that get hit by the wave (think metropolitan UK, USA, Japan as early adopters) it will be pervasive in the sense that it will be integrated into every day life, the way you now sometimes see adverts giving a contact URL instead of a contact phone number or address for their company. It becomes reasonable to assume that people know about and can access the technology if they choose. --DR
In 30 years time, I think we will see some shifts in society caused by this technological trend.
Given the prior, this is inevitable. You might want to link to /SocialConsequences here though, or the comment seems pointless. --Vitenka
yes, thank you for the link. Also back to /TheFuture.
Interesting [piece by Tim Bray] on [the Long Tail]. He references a blog entry on [why people blog] which talks about "Finding your Tribe", and I think that is right. Putting information out there, being part of a network of mutually commenting weblogs is very much about being part of a tribe, a clade. And there are several signs pointing forwards:
polls, especially friend of friend memes designed to find out "who else is one of us"
self rating and categorisation - people running several blogs, using icons for different topics, and using cutouts for specialist/boring bits.
I don't think it will be too long before we start seeing higher orders of /MediatedTrust getting involved in blogs reading.
Diversity seems to lead to convergence. The increasing pace of change has lead to more technologies being simultaneously in use. This diversity of tools avilable has, I think, tended to increased the number of tools people use. So a community based off one tool (eg email lists) doesn't just restrict itself to interacting that way. For instance yahoo groups (whose origins come from web management of email lists) use email, the web, live chat, mutual calendaring. And you can see a similar cross section of tools being used by aggregators that sprang from different sources (personal advert websites, instant messaging, online games, web logs, software development project management).
Collaborative knowledge structures are just another such tool. And people will use them, not because they suddenly think "Oh, today I'm going to join a collaborative knowledge structure, that sounds fun", but because interacting via your /AmiCog will be just another part of what your tribes do and are.
Clade : An organizational term used in cladistics to describe a group of related organisms From [Croquet]:
Social computing involves systems that support the gathering, representation, processing, and dissemination of information that is distributed across many individuals. Such systems include collaborative filtering and recommender systems (e.g., firefly), online auction sites (e.g., ebay), and open source virtual communities (e.g., slashdot). Social computing systems are likely to contain components that support and represent social constructs such as identity, reputation, trust, accountability, presence, social roles, and ownership. In such systems, it is not just the data that matters, but who that data "belongs to", and how the identity of the "owner" of that data is related to other identities in the system.
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