'Revolutionary' collective intelligence of users touted at Web 2.0 Expo

Computerworld - SAN FRANCISCO — While Web 2.0 technologies may have struggled in the past against criticism that they are self-indulgent time-wasters, Web 2.0 is now being touted as a collection of ground-breaking applications that can harness the collective intelligence of a multitude of users.

That was the message here at the opening of the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo, where Tim O'Reilly, president of O'Reilly Media, noted that the Internet's emergence as a platform itself marks an "amazing revolution in human augmentation" akin to the advent of literacy. He highlighted Web 2.0 applications that use Google Earth to track global deforestation and those aiming to shed light on how congressional legislation is written and passed as examples of this revolution.

"The real heart of Web 2.0 is collective intelligence, which I have defined as harnessing the network effect to build applications that get better the more people use them," he said. "Applications that are built on open, decentralized networks actually lead to new concentrations of power."

O'Reilly went on to urge enterprises to understand that just as Google flourished when it realized the meaning behind links in search results, there is hidden meaning — and useful information — behind enterprise data.

"Enterprises really are starting to understand that Web 2.0 is about turning themselves inside out ... opening themselves to the world in new ways," he said.

For example, he pointed to Wesabe, a personal finance application on the Web that allows users to share information about how they spend their money; when rolled up, that data can show trends about certain merchants. The Wesabe app showed that even as users spend more money at one merchant, they are more likely to return for a second time to another competing merchant, O'Reilly said. While banks could have developed this type of application on their own, a start-up actually tackled it because it saw an unmet consumer need.

"That is a lot of what Enterprise 2.0 is about — letting users into your back office and then turning your company inside out," he said. "There is this amazing confluence of technology and opportunity at a time where we can really change the world."

Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University, also touched on this notion of the transformative powers of collective intelligence on a large scale. Shirky, the author of the recently published book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, opened his argument about the influence of Web 2.0 with a counterintuitive assertion that the technology most critical to the 20th century is the television sitcom. That's because the sitcom served to consume the vast "cognitive surplus" that people found themselves facing after World War II when they began working a standard five-day workweek and had extra time on their hands.