I heard David Gurteen brilliantly remind us recently that Information is not Power - but the ability to do something with information is. Like me you might have noticed that there are often people who possess immense amounts of knowledge and information, but don't really have the personal skills to use it. There are those people also who are born to create traction, they are often knowledge parasites, but they get things moving and make things happen.
Social networking has to be as much about connecting different skills sets as about just connecting people with knowledge to people with shared knowledge. That's why I don't feel bad about the small percentage of people that are presumed to actually contribute to blogs and community spaces. It will always be the case and it might be the 'lurkers' that put the shared knowledge to good use.
So gathering collective intelligence is one thing. But what we gonna do with it when we've got it and can we really do it collectively? Is it really possible for individuals to collectively use shared knowledge?
An exciting experiment is taking place to prove just that>
"The central premise of We Are Smarter Than Me is that large groups of people ("We") can, and should, take responsibility for traditional business functions that are currently performed by companies, industries and experts ("Me").
A few books have recently been written on this topic, but they all fail to confront one central paradox. While they extol the power of communities, they were each written by only one person. We're putting this paradox to the test by inviting hundreds of thousands of authors to contribute to this "network book" using today's technologies."
Although largely a lurker and a parasite, they seem to have accepted my application to help author.
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