Introduction

Abstract

With nearly 1 billion people online worldwide, social networks are rapidly becoming a collective force of unprecedented power and, for the first time in human history, mass cooperation across space and time is suddenly economical. According to Mitch Kapor, the founder of the Lotus Development Corporation:

A decade ago we were at the dawn of that era and not at all clear about what it was going to be like. Now we are part of the way into it, so some things, like e-mail and e-commerce, we can safely assume are going to be major features of life for the next half century. And there are new phenomena rising out of the Internet that were utterly — or almost utterly — unanticipated, like Wikipedia, which is creating a new online community bent on upgrading our communal knowledge. (http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2586)