This is a topic of special interest to me. I have been fascinated by several aspects of using Internet as a Reseach Tool. Tracking information, ideas, trends is what we do as a company. So when I found this article about Internet as the Research Tool for Scientific Computing, I was curious.
From 2020 Computing: The Creativity Machine.
What will emerge from using the Internet as a research tool? The answer, Vernor Vinge argues, will be limited only by our imaginations.
We humans have built a creativity machine. It's the sum of three things: a few hundred million computers, a communication system connecting those computers, and some millions of human beings using those computers and
communications.
Vernor describes the increasing impact Internet is having on scientific research.
There are now physics, medical and proteomics projects enlisting the enthusiasm of people (and their computers) across the world. For linguists and sociologists, new questions can be investigated simply by observing what occurs on the publicly available Internet. Even experimental
sociology is possible: in their study of social influence on music preference, Salganik et al. recruited more than 14,000 subjects through a popular website, ran online trials on these subjects, and then obtained results directly from their experiment website.
Even MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role playing games) and Virtual Worlds (like Second Life) have millions of users. It is a study in collaborative content creation. Massive collaboration may be the way we manage the world in the future. It is an exciting time to be here, now and be part of it all.