The New Wisdom of the Web

There's a litany of characteristics of what makes something go on what may be best called the Living Web. Here's the latest start-up crib sheet:

The smartest guy in the room is everybody.Tim O'Reilly, an early promoter of the Web 2.0 idea, says, "The central idea is harnessing collective intelligence." This sounds lofty, but is actually happening all the time on the Web. Every time you type in a search query on Google, what's happening under the hood is the equivalent of a massive polling operation to see which other sites people on the Web have deemed most relevant to that term. Magically, it yields a result that no amount of hands-on filtering could have managed. "It's clear that the Web is structurally congenial to the wisdom of crowds," says James Surowiecki, author of a book ("The Wisdom of Crowds," naturally) that argues that your average bunch of people can guess the weight of a cow or predict an Oscar winner better than an expert can. That's why some people believe that an army of bloggers can provide an alternative to even the smartest journalists, and that if millions of eyes monitor encyclopedia entries that anyone can write and rewrite (namely, the Wikipedia), the result will take on Britannica.

Tom Sawyer was an early adopter. When Mark Twain's creation connived his buddies into painting the fence for him, he didn't call it "user-generated content." It took the Living Web to figure that one out. Obvious example: Craigslist. With its spartan interface, the online community bulletin board has a threadbare 1950s Eastern European feel. But millions rely on its classified-ad-type listings for jobs, apartments, concert tickets and sexual hookups--and those same millions provide the postings, without which Craig would be unlisted. "The fact that our site is almost completely self-service and community-moderated allows our tiny staff of 19 to manage the seventh largest Web site in the world," says CEO Jim Buckmaster. (Craig Newmark, its founder and namesake, concentrates on customer service.) And the same economics that allow Craigslist to thrive (it takes fees from only a fraction of its users, and is otherwise free to all) has made the list an unintentional, though devastating, competitor of newspapers that charge for classified ads.

Similarly, YouTube, a year-old start-up whose 25 employees work in offices above a San Mateo, Calif., pizzeria, is competing toe to toe with giant media conglomerates by having its millions of users supply it with the 35,000 videos added to the site each day; visitors to the site view 30 million videos a day. The big guys have noticed--Google Video now lets users upload videos and even sell them, and Microsoft has a project code named Warhol that will ask users to send it videos beginning this summer.

Once users supply content, Living Web sites ask them to organize it. Two years ago Joshua Schachter began del.icio.us, a way for people to store and share their favorite Web-browsing bookmarks online. Instead of organizing them himself, or even creating a standard taxonomy of categories, Schachter used something called user tagging--people simply labeled the bookmarks by any name they wanted, and eventually the group as a whole effectively voted on them by either adopting those tags themselves or rejecting them. And now del.icio.us has been gobbled up by Yahoo, which hopes to extend the tagging principle to all sorts of its services.

It's all one Web. The most effective sites on the Living Web have porous boundaries and are happy to act in concert with other sites, even competing ones. This process is greased by an explosion of cheap geeky software tools known as the Web's "connective tissue." Though they sport exotic acronyms and obscure code names, what they do is clearly valuable. Ajax provides Web-based applications with the same flexibility of programs that run on your computer. RSS lets you "subscribe" to targeted information from a Web service in the way you subscribe to magazines. (And no blow-in cards.) "Opening your APIs" means you're allowing other services to integrate information from your database into their sites. The purest expression of this free-for-all attitude is the wonderful mash-ups, where clever hackers take live information streams from two or more sites and blend them together for illumination or sometimes just for a laugh. An example is the mash-up that displayed vacant apartments offered on Craigslist on a local Google map.