Knowledge Sharing

First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII - and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.

~ Douglas Adams

While it's true that many corporate and e-commerce sites, popup ads, and the like do give parts of the Web a glossy brochure-like feel, I would say that the real value of the WWW is the ability for people to pool and share knowledge. The Web provides us with a vast and ever-growing library where each of us can check things in as well as check things out! It's an online treasure trove of information, a vast cyber-storehouse of knowledge. The more we put in, the more each of us can get back out.

I recently ran across a ComputerWorld essay (blog entry) entitled "Why Blogging Is Good For IT Professionals". The author, Alex Scoble, writes:

Blogs are great ways to warehouse your knowledge in a place ... that is accessible to you from virtually anywhere in the world.

What good does storing your knowledge do for you? Ever come across a problem that you know you've seen before but don't know when or how you fixed it?

If you had blogged about it, you could quickly search your blog using Google or another search tool to find the answer.
...
You will get out of your blog what you put into it. Write often about topics that interest you and other similarly interested people will find you. Even if they don't, you will still get all of the other benefits that blogging has to offer.

After all, the internet is much bigger than your brain.

What if you're not quite convinced that you should start a blog? Perhaps you aren't sure you have enough information to share. Or, you hesitate to commit yourself to writing something every day (or even every week). You can still add to the vast knowledge pool that is the WWW. Consider starting with one of the communal collaboration sites such as Wikipedia or (just launched) AnswerWiki.

Wikipedia is the free, communal encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Entries are available in over 100 languages. Wikipedia just passed 1 million articles in English (the other languages combined add up to more than another million).

Begun in 2001, Wikipedia has rapidly grown into the largest reference website on the Internet. The content of Wikipedia is free, written collaboratively by people from all around the world. This website is a wiki, which means that anyone with access to an Internet-connected computer can edit, correct, or improve information throughout the encyclopedia, simply by clicking the edit this page link.

-- Wikipedia:About

AnswerWiki is a new site that is

...designed to be a user generated question and answer portal where visitors can find answers to specific questions and share their knowledge freely. Any visitor to the site can ask questions or answer questions they know the answers to by editing the pages of the website. The site was created using MediaWiki, the same wiki software used to run the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

-- New Wiki Website Allows Users to Ask and Answer Questions with Ease at PRWeb.com

Start by reading. If you see a typo or an error, fix it. When you find an area you know something about, contribute your knowledge to the site. If your special interest area hasn't been written about yet, start a new page.

When I first started to "surf the web" back in 1994, there wasn't much to see. As each person found new sites of interest, however, we'd bookmark the links and share them with our friends, either by email or on our newly created home pages.

Gradually, at first, then more rapidly, those of us who read the web became writers as well. As more people got involved, more pages were created. Improvements in technology made it easier for anyone (not just techies) to help add content to the Web.

Twenty years ago, if I wanted to look something up, I went to the library. Ten years ago, the Web was new and small, but full of potential. Today, if I want to look something up, I turn first to my web browser and Google or Wikipedia. Who knows how I'll look things up ten years from now.

Think of the WWW as an inverted pyramid scheme. The more people participate, the more information we collect, and the richer we all become.

Join the Information Age. Share your knowledge. Write your part of the web.

What are you waiting for?