What really impresses me about the big Web 2.0 sites is how they use familiar metaphors in new ways. By starting from what we already know (such as profiles, groups, ratings, and ‘friends’), people naturally understand why it might be useful, fun, and easy to add their own online contributions. Kind of like how the blog metaphor liberated personal websites from the more difficult and foreign notion of the ‘home page’.

I’ve written a short exploratory paper on the contrast between the ‘abundance’ of knowledge sharing in Web 2.0 communities, and the ‘scarcity’ of knowledge sharing that is predicted by much of the academic literature. The academic research, mostly done inside organizations, usually finds that people are really, really reluctant to share any knowledge online–what’s in it for me, they ask? So they see it as a ‘public goods’ problem. According to this thinking, there’s no reason to share valuable knowledge when you can ‘free-ride’ off the contributions of others. People have to be rewarded, or else they won’t share.

Web 2.0 communities don’t have that problem–people share, a lot! So it’s time to change the knowledge sharing problem from ‘how to bribe people’ to ‘how to turn all this peer-based sharing into useful knowledge’.

(As an aside, I think this is one reason why wikis are still challenging–there are plenty of empty wikis out there. Our ‘shared document’ and ‘version control’ metaphors aren’t nearly as widespread, or as well-developed, as simple metaphors like comments or ratings.)

A version of this paper will be presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS-08) in June.