An excellent piece in Business Week, "The Power of Us," explores the transforming power of internet mass collaboration on business - and just about everything else, including the entertainment, publishing, and advertising world (via paidcontent). The article proclaims, "Behold the power of us," citing various examples of connected communities altering the established order - blogs rocking the media establishment, Linux programmers challenging Microsoft, virtual supercomputers composed of millions of volunteers' PCs.

What we have, then, is a "big, hairy, monstrous organism…the nearly 1 billion people online worldwide - along with their shared knowledge, social contacts, online reputations, computing power…. For the first time in human history, mass cooperation across time and space is suddenly economical."

An emerging generation of internet technologies is driving this mass cooperation, including file-sharing, blogs, wikis, and social networking services, all of which are gradually realizing the net's ability to connect many people with many others at the same time. And "what sets these new technologies apart from those of the internet's first generation is their canny way of turning self-interest into social benefit - and real economic value."