Knowledge Wants To Be Free

Amazing things happen when technology empowers people to set knowledge free.  For the set-up question check Seth Godin’s short post here.

Here’s the answer.

The skyrocketing growth chart is all about Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia.  If you use it, you know how useful it is. Wikipedia contains twice as much content as the Encyclopedia Britannica. In a previous age, when some organization needed to serve as the aggregator for this knowledge (Britannica, World Book, Collier’s (Microsoft), etc.), there was a good business model in serving that role. However, that is no longer the case. Wikipedia is a wiki and that means people who are the users (like you and me) can provide the content. We are the aggregators.

You’ll be seeing more about wikis. They can serve as powerful tools for collaboration and as repositories of information and knowledge. In the case of Wikipedia, it has largely eliminated or altered the need for private aggregators to provide this content. As a result,  someone’s previous business model has become largely extinct.