I am currently reading Andrew McAfee's book Enterprise 2.0, New Collaborative Tools for your Organisation's Toughest Challenges, and approached it with caution, having had it recommended to me by my husband. I am pleased to report that it is an easy and entertaining read, packed with information in a straightforward and non tech-speak way. I already knew that the web had finally achieved it's original dream of becoming participatory and collaborative but I had no idea of the technology behind it. What amazed me most was the cleverness in which the links and tags work "causing pattern and structure to appear over time" (McAfee, 2009, p. 48) in what most people thought would become an over-cluttered platform; the more people use the web, the more structured it becomes, and the users become the driving force for quality. Google is also a wonderful tool. I remember first using the internet and trying to search for things and being shown pages and pages of irrelevant drivel. Google works using links and extensions, returning pages that have the most links to them and so are therefore more likely to be what you are looking for, and it also remembers previous searches and like-minded people's searches, so anticipates your needs. Amazing!
In a previous life I worked for Adult Education in Cornwall County Council in the UK which had it's own huge intranet site. It was a nightmare as you could never find what you were looking for and each individual office had to reinvent procedures. If only Web 2.0 had been around, how much easier our jobs would have been! My eyes are now open to the possibilities that this sharing can bring, for example,doctors surgeries adding symptoms and diagnosis may tease out patterns and causes, helping identify illnesses earlier and maybe even help find cures.
I finish with a good description of the web from Tim O'Reilly - that the web is organic, growing as an output of the collective activity (2005, p. 2).
References
McAfee A. (2009). Enterprise 2.0: New collaborative tools for your organisation's toughest challenges. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press
O'Reilly T. (2005). What is web 2.0: design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. Retrieved from http://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/4578.html
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