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After blogging about this and talking to my network about it, we thought it would be interesting to write something collaboratively using our collective intelligence

These changes are facilitated (although, importantly, not solely driven) by the emergence of new, participatory technologies of information access, knowledge exchange, and content production, many of whom are associated with Internet and new media technologies.

J.C. Herz has described the same process as ‘harnessing the hive’ (2005) – that is, the harnessing of promising and useful ideas, generated by expert consumers, by commercial producers (and sometimes under ethically dubious models which appear to exploit and thus hijack the hive as a cheap generator of ideas, rather than merely harnessing it in a benign fashion).

These produsers engage not in a traditional form of content production, but are instead involved in produsage – the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

We might like to think that information-sharing is intrinsic to academic work, especially academic work that is publicly funded. However we also place many restrictions on publishing, like peer review, and I imagine there are still academics who try to keep their work secret until it is ready for any number of semi-paranoid reasons. I'm not going to say we shouldn't do these things, but we need to recognize that the discipline works by controlling the production and distribution of disciplinary knowledge.

Now, however, the President's Daily Brief and other crucial intelligence reports often rely less on secrets from risky espionage missions than on material that's available to just about anyone.

Such material is known as "open-source intelligence" or, in the acronym-laden parlance of the 16 federal agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, OSINT. The explosion of information available via the Internet and other public sources has pushed the collection and analysis of that material to the top of the official priority list in the spy world, intelligence officials say.

Federal commissions repeatedly have criticized the intelligence community for not moving more quickly and aggressively to exploit open-source information.

Ryan Bretag I'll join in the fun if you'll have me. Let me know time when you know.

Lisa Parisi This morning I came here before I went to twitter. This seems to be the place to be right now. Still not sure of all the groupings, taggings, etc. Reading what everyone writes and hoping to get it soon

I was going to present 20 minutes on Del.icio.us, but I may show Diigo instead - or both - or 20 minutes is not enough....