When the Internet was invented, it was looked upon as a way to find information in online encyclopaedia, or to advertise marketing material, or to find basic information. In other words, everyone expected it to be a glorified, easily accessible encyclopaedia, with maybe a few experts easily accessible online.
What few people dreamed was that the Internet would rapidly transform the way we look at all communication.
By using forums and wikis online, we can transcend communications limitations. Instead of asking one person at a time a question, we can post it and wait for one of hundreds of people at the forum to answer. Instead of looking up different bits of information in hundreds of places, we’re finding it gathered together and easily accessible at wikis and forums.
This has been made dramatically clear by recent events. Instead of searching for a loved one in a major disaster through hundreds of different aid databases, worried relatives and friends can find them by posting a query online, or by checking online postings made by some of the lost themselves.
Forums have been a real blessing recently in disasters in Southeast Asia and on the...