Web Content : By & For The Masses

(Via NYTimes) Rapidly growing array of Web services seek to exploit the Internet's power to bring people together. From photo - and calendar-sharing services to "citizen journalist" sites and annotated satellite images, the Internet is morphing yet again. A remarkable array of software systems makes it simple to share anything instantly, and sometimes enhance it along the way. Inexpensive to create and worldwide in reach, the new Internet services are having an impact far beyond the file sharing for which it got used traditionally. The abundance of user-generated content - which includes online games, desktop video and citizen journalism sites - is reshaping the debate over file sharing. The new services offer a bottom-up creative process that is shifting the flow of information away from a one-way broadcast or publishing model, giving rise to a wave of new business ventures and touching off a scramble by media and technology companies to respond.
Yahoo’s My Web 2.0, a new version of the company's search engine will harness the collective power of small groups of Web surfers to improve the quality of search results. The service, referred to as a "social search engine," is based on a new page-ranking technology that Yahoo has named MyRank. MyRank organizes pages based on how closely search users are related to one another in their social network and on their reputation for turning up helpful information. My Web 2.0 allows Web pages found useful by one member of a group to be instantly accessible to a network of trusted associates and to their network contacts as well. The Internet's new phase will shift power away from old-line media and software companies while rapidly bringing about an age of computerized "augmentation" by blending the skills of tens of thousands of individuals. The Internet is now making it possible to exploit collective intellectual power of Internet users efficiently and instantly.
Kevin Kelly's viewpoint about the internet - Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network & from this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous inventionis closer to becoming a reality. .