From Chris Anderson…

Metcalfe’s Law says that value of a networks grows with the square of the number of nodes. Today’s Web, which is as much about contributing as consuming — two-way links, as opposed to the old one-way networks of broadcast and traditional media — allows the same to apply to people. Connecting minds allows our collective intelligence to grow with each person who joins the global conversation. This information propagation process, which was once found in just a few cultures of shared knowledge, such as academic science, is now seen online in everything from hobbies to history. The result, I think, will be the fastest increase in human knowledge in history…