Foreword
When I founded ReadWriteWeb[1] back in April 2003, a tech news and analysis blog that is now one of the world’s top 10 blogs,[2] my goal was to explore the current era of the web. The year 2003 was a time when the effects of the dot-com meltdown were still being felt, yet there was something new stirring on the web, too. I christened my new blog Read/Write Web (the slash and space have since been dropped) because this new era of the web seemed to embody the notion that Tim Berners-Lee had when he invented the web—that it ought to be editable by anyone and that everyone contributes in some way to the web’s data.
2 According to Technorati http://www.technorati.com/pop/blogs/
As Satnam Alag writes in this book, collective intelligence as a research field actually predates the web. But it was after the dot-com era had ended that we began to see evidence of collective intelligence applied to the web. In 2003 we regularly saw it in sites like Amazon, with its user reviews and recommendations, eBay with its user-driven auctions, Wikipedia with its editable encyclopedia, and Google with its mysterious PageRank algorithm for ranking the popularity of web pages.