Internet collaboration in general is still an evolving technique, with the biggest advances still to come.  Public collaboration online will play an important role in the very near future, but how will that information be used and is it safe?

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, spoke to AFP on his opinions surrounding Internet collaboration and where he saw it going in the future.  Beyond basic factual collaboration such as Wikipedia, Wales spoke of collaboration in video and other media as well as the impacts it will have on public information and the way it’s used by governments, according to Yahoo News.

Wales didn’t disregard the advancements his company has already made in online collaboration.  He mentioned a recent trip to a slum village in India where he “met this young man on the street who told me that he had used Wikipedia to pass his 11th grade exams.”  Almost everyone has used Wikipedia either on purpose or involuntarily being it shows up in nearly every search.  “We’re really just at the beginning, still, of collaborative efforts,” continued Wales.

Collaboration in videos is an area of interest for Wales stating; “In video, right now, we’re still back in many ways in the Web 1.0 era,” he said, referring to the age before so-called Web 2.0, the peer-sharing model of the Internet of which Wikipedia is almost the definitive example.  “What we haven’t seen yet in video is large-scale collaborative projects.”  With viral videos being so popular, it is surprising that more collaboration isn’t exercised.

A more interesting part of the interview with Wales was hearing his thoughts on the effects of individuals putting that much content out into the open, leaving a “virtual footprint” every time they do so.  He warned that major steps had to be considered to stop governments abusing ordinary people’s personal information, which is increasingly stored in vast computer databases.  “We need to really think about what the political controls we need to have in place to prevent governments from abusing that kind of information.”

As the internet becomes more viral and social, online collaboration will as well.  The “Web 2.0” concept relies on collaboration of all kinds in regards to people’s actions online.  Something tells me that we’ll move far beyond basic commenting on blogs and forums, or editing articles on Wikipedia.  It should be interesting to see what evolves.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, November 1st, 2008 at 10:23 pm under Internet, Opinion.

Read more entries by Justin Montgomery.
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