Previously, I made the following assertions about the way in which domain knowledge was spread on the Internet 10 years ago and is spread today:
– Previously, the locus of online production and retrieval of knowledge was a group (Usenet newsgroup). The effect of the Web (initially) was to shift that locus to an individual person, company, or organization.
– The old style of interaction was conversational and collaborative, exemplifying “peer-to-peer” before that buzzphrase came into common (over)use. The Web’s effect was to move the interaction to a largely client-server, publisher-reader type relationship.
– The “easy” knowledge problems have been solved pretty well (the easy ones are those that one can imagine a SQL query for, like “what time is the movie playing,” or “what score/price did my team/stock achieve?”). The “hard” problems are those that you can’t imagine a SQL query for, but you could get answers to if you were in a room with a bunch of knowledgable folks.
– New (uses of) technologies like blogs, Wikis, and Content Management Systems are helping to move us back up to the point we were at in 1993.