Knowledge Management

After our headlong rush towards the Internet in the 1990's and the bursting of the dot-com bubble, we are now able to pick through the spoils and build the future that the Internet originally envisaged.

Empowering people to edit and create is a critical factor. This is what HTML offered to many technicians. The anarchic Internet allows anyone with minimal technical knowledge to publish their thoughts to anyone interested in reading. The result is an extraordinary resource of knowledge that the next generations will rightly take for granted.

As technology continues to make the act of editing and publishing easier, so the technical barriers to publication will fall. We can continue to reap greater rewards from shared editing. Blogging trivialises the process of making a website. With the help of advertising models like Google's, its even possible to gain micro-payment revenue for providing resources that are invaluable to small markets. Previously, reaching such markets would have been prohibitively expensive and those resources would never have been created.

Technology provides the capability, and the market takes advantage. We're able to store and retrieve a much large fraction of the experience we gather as thinking beings than ever before. This is the age of knowledge management - a quantitive change in our ability to work with information that leads to a qualitative change in our ability to understand and progress.