The Internet isn’t just about e-mail or the Web anymore. Increasingly, people on-line are taking the power of the Internet back into their own hands. They’re posting opinions on on-line journals – weblogs, or blogs; they’re organizing political rallies on MoveOn.org; they’re trading songs on illegal file-sharing networks; they’re volunteering articles for the online encyclopedia Wikipedia; and they’re collaborating with other programmers around the world. It’s the emergence of the “Power of Us”. Thanks to new technologies such as blog software, peer-to-peer networks, open-source software, and wikis, people are getting together to take collective action like never before.
eBay, for instance, wouldn’t exist without the 61 million active members who list, sell, and buy millions of items a week. But less obvious is that the whole marketplace runs on the trust created by eBay’s unique feedback system, by which buyers and sellers rate each other on how well they carried out their half of each transaction. Pioneer e-tailer Amazon encourages all kinds of customer participation in the site – including the ability to sell items alongside its own books, CDs, DVDs and electronic goods. MySpace and Facebook are the latest phenomena in social networking, attracting millions of unique visitors a month. Many are music fans, who can blog, e-mail friends, upload photos, and generally socialize. There’s even a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents, called Second Life, where real companies have opened shops, and pop stars such as U2 have performed concerts.
Some sites are much more specialized, such as the photo-sharing site Flicker. There, people not only share photos but also take the time to attach tags to their pictures, which help everyone else find photos of, for example, Florence, Italy. Another successful example of a site based on user-generated content is You Tube, which allows users to upload, view and share movie clips and music videos, as well as amateur video-blogs. Another example of the collective power of the Internet is the Google search engine. Its mathematical formulas surf the combined judgements of millions of people whose websites link to other sites. When you type Justin Timberlake into Google's search box and go to the star’s official website, the site is listed first because more people are telling you it’s the most relevant Justin Timberlake site – which it probably is.