Een interessant artikel over de mogelijkheden van internet

The Web is finally starting to deliver on its original promise, which was to foster collective intelligence by connecting all the world's information. We've learned over the years since Berners-Lee first proposed HTML as a common standard that you need more than raw connectivity to create a network that grows smarter with use; you need more than interlinked pages to create true self-organization. You need specific tools -- but those tools themselves can be relatively simple. (In fact, sometimes the simpler the better.) And if you design your system well, and populate it with enough people, something genuinely revolutionary will happen, something radically unlike a print magazine or a television broadcast, closer to the way an ant colony works, or a city neighborhood. You can see the first years of the Web as its embryonic phase, passing through the body plans of its cultural ancestors: magazine, newspaper, mall, sitcom. But there is something radically new about to be born online. Its features are still undeveloped, and it hasn't yet become self-sufficient.

-- Ben (ben@timedesk.nl), July 29, 2001