only coincidentally reciprocal. Flickr thus allows users to set watch lists--any user can subscribe to any other users photostream via RSS. The object of attention is notified, but does not have to approve the connection. If an essential part of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence, turning the web into a kind of global brain, the blogosphere is the equivalent of constant mental chatter in the forebrain, the voice we hear in all of our heads. It may not reflect the deep structure of the brain, which is often unconscious, but is instead the equivalent of conscious thought. And as a reflection of conscious thought and attention, the blogosphere has gun to have a powerful effect First, because search engines use link structure to help predict useful pages, bloggers, as the most prolific and timely linkers, have a disproportionate role in shaping search engine results. Second, because the blogging community is so highly self-referential, bloggers paying attention to other bloggers magnifies their visibility and wer.The "echo chamber" that critics decry is also an amplifie If it were merely an amplifier, blogging would be uninteresting. But like wikipedia, blogging harnesses collective intelligence as a kind of filter. What James Suriowecki calls"the wisdom of crowds"comes into play and much as Page Rank produces better results than analysis of any individual document, the collective attention of the blogosphere selects for value While mainstream media may see individual blogs as competitors, what is really unnerving is that the competition is with the blogosphere as a whole. This is not just a competition between sites, but a competition between business models. The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls"we, the media, a world in which"the former audience", not a few people in a back room, decides what's important 3. Data is the next intel inside Every significant internet application to date has been backed by a specialized database: Google's web crawl, Yahoo!'s directory (and web crawl), Amazons database of products, eBay's database of products and sellers, MapQuest,s map databases, Napster's distributed song database. As Hal Varian remarked in a personal conversation last year, "SQL is the new HTML. " Database management is a core competency of Web 2.0 companies, so much so that we have sometimes referred to these applications as"infoware"rather than merely software This fact leads to a key question: Who owns the data? n the internet era, one can already see a number of cases where control over the database has led to market control and outsized financial returns. The monopoly on domain name registry initially granted by government fiat to Network Solutions (later purchased by Verisign) was one of the first great moneymakers of the internet. While weve argued that business advantage via controlling software APIs is much more difficult in the age of the nternet, control of key data sources is not, especially if those data sources are expensive to create or amenable to increasing returns via network effects. LookatthecopyrightnoticesatthebaseofeverymapservedbyMapquest,mapsyahoocommapsmsn.com, or maps. google. com, and you'll see the line Maps copyright NavTeq, TeleAtlas, or with the new satelliteonly coincidentally reciprocal. (Flickr thus allows users to set watch lists--any user can subscribe to any other user's photostream via RSS. The object of attention is notified, but does not have to approve the connection.) If an essential part of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence, turning the web into a kind of global brain, the blogosphere is the equivalent of constant mental chatter in the forebrain, the voice we hear in all of our heads. It may not reflect the deep structure of the brain, which is often unconscious, but is instead the equivalent of conscious thought. And as a reflection of conscious thought and attention, the blogosphere has begun to have a powerful effect. First, because search engines use link structure to help predict useful pages, bloggers, as the most prolific and timely linkers, have a disproportionate role in shaping search engine results. Second, because the blogging community is so highly self-referential, bloggers paying attention to other bloggers magnifies their visibility and power. The "echo chamber" that critics decry is also an amplifier. If it were merely an amplifier, blogging would be uninteresting. But like Wikipedia, blogging harnesses collective intelligence as a kind of filter. What James Suriowecki calls "the wisdom of crowds" comes into play, and much as PageRank produces better results than analysis of any individual document, the collective attention of the blogosphere selects for value. While mainstream media may see individual blogs as competitors, what is really unnerving is that the competition is with the blogosphere as a whole. This is not just a competition between sites, but a competition between business models. The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls " we, the media," a world in which "the former audience", not a few people in a back room, decides what's important. 3. Data is the Next Intel Inside Every significant internet application to date has been backed by a specialized database: Google's web crawl, Yahoo!'s directory (and web crawl), Amazon's database of products, eBay's database of products and sellers, MapQuest's map databases, Napster's distributed song database. As Hal Varian remarked in a personal conversation last year, "SQL is the new HTML." Database management is a core competency of Web 2.0 companies, so much so that we have sometimes referred to these applications as " infoware" rather than merely software. This fact leads to a key question: Who owns the data? In the internet era, one can already see a number of cases where control over the database has led to market control and outsized financial returns. The monopoly on domain name registry initially granted by government fiat to Network Solutions (later purchased by Verisign) was one of the first great moneymakers of the internet. While we've argued that business advantage via controlling software APIs is much more difficult in the age of the internet, control of key data sources is not, especially if those data sources are expensive to create or amenable to increasing returns via network effects. Look at the copyright notices at the base of every map served by MapQuest, maps.yahoo.com, maps.msn.com, or maps.google.com, and you'll see the line "Maps copyright NavTeq, TeleAtlas," or with the new satellite