Is community better than institution?

The web has become ubiquitous. Everyone with access to a computer can contribute their thoughts to the global community. Will it spell the end of institutional information?

I was recently invited to join the Newsvine beta. It strikes me as something inspired by Wikipedia, another community knowledge site. Essentially a blogsphere where individuals can write their own news stories, it offers a number of new twists that I think will make it a winner. News stories, for example, can be rated to “raise” them to the front page. There’s also a revenue model, allowing authors of popular stories to receive advertising-derived income. I’m still just exploring it, but the tailoring and interactive aspects of it are very intriguing.

The idea of owning a hardcopy of an encyclopedia in today’s age of up-to-the-minute web enabled information access seems wasteful on so many levels. As services such as Wikipedia and Newsvine evolve and grow, we may well find that the institutional repositories are too stale and limited.

I already search Wikipedia for information before I think of looking at any on-line encyclopedia. If Newsvine achieves its potential I’ll be looking there for my world news every morning, rather than the Wall Street Journal.