Share and share alike - Web 2.0
JAMES HEIN

 
If you have been following the Web 2.0 series of articles you will have at least picked up by now that Web 2.0 involves participation of some kind. If you visit http://www.bricklin.com/cornucopia.htm you will find a nice paper called the "The Cornucopia of the Commons", by Dan Bricklin.

The paper points out that there are three ways to build a large database. The first - as demonstrated by Yahoo! - is to pay people to do it. The second is to get volunteers to perform the same task. This approach was inspired by lessons provided by the open source community. The result of this is the Open Directory Project, an open source Yahoo! competitor. Napster showed us the third way, where every user automatically helped to build the value of the shared database. This is the same approach used by all other P2P file sharing services since then.

So the next key lesson from the Web 2.0 era is that users add value. The corollary to this is that only a small percentage of users will be bothered to go to the trouble of adding value explicitly.

What do I mean by this? If you are a P2P user of any kind, take a look at the ratio of those providing the information to those leeching or downloading from it. In general the grabbers always outweigh the providers. How many people go to the trouble of providing a book review, or comment about bad files, or provide helpful hints and so on? Again the number that contribute tends to be far less than the total number of users in any system or environment.

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