Web 2.0 == Collective Intelligence?

The girl that used to live in my place never changed her address for her Newsweek subscription, so I get Newsweek now. There’s nothing novel in the story linked to below, except that it’s been interesting to watch these new sites on the web (Flickr, del.icio.us, MySpace, and even Craigslist) evolve from a nerdy teen phenomenon to mainstream companies that are attracting a lot of attention (and quite a bit of money to boot.) Although the MSDN Forums aren’t quite as “cutting edge” as these sites are, and they focus on developer technical support, not more “fun” things like photo sharing or social networking, the concept remains the same: the power of the Internet isn’t in the wires and CPUs networked together, but rather from the ad-hoc creation of “collective intelligence”.

 

https://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12015774/site/newsweek/

 

Isn’t the collective wisdom of 125,000+ forum users is greater and more useful than all of the “How to learn C# in less than 30 minutes” books you should ever buy?