In the early days of personal computing, sharing a file was a matter of copying it to a floppy disk and walking it to the person down the hall with whom you intended to share the contents. Cross-country and international file-sharing was conducted by post or overnight shipping. Everything happened very slowly, as information crept across the world at essentially the same pace as postal mail. Sharing at vastly increased speed is the keystone for understanding what you can do with social media. 

One of the first tasks the Internet was given involved moving a file between California and Utah. On the social network, by contrast, sharing files and information is the basic activity on the social network. Information flows between shared documents as much or more than files themselves are transferred from place to place. The change explains much of the apparent magic in making social connections across the street or around the world.

Those early files that crawled across the Internet at minute fractions of today’s data speeds were, for the most part, treated as self-contained messages, a letter, email, the content of a database or a technical paper. Ends in themself that traveled from point to point pretty much intact, as static documents.

Today’s file-sharing is radically different. Most file-sharing involves annotation and modification of data in some way, so that files become repositories for many contributors’ intelligence. Finishing a document, then sharing it is only scratching the surface of collaboration; it’s possible now to have hundreds of contributors provide ideas and creative work to a document you’ve shared. Nothing’s done before it is shared and, if the creator of a work chooses, new versions of their work augmented by others can continue to evolve forever.

Nor do files necessarily move across the Net in the traditional sense, rather others can use the Internet to dip into the files stored elsewhere on the Net to modify something they have stored on their own computer or at a Web site. For instance, personal calendars can be checked for available times that a meeting might happen and, based on some computation about the unscheduled times a meeting time set and added to all the participants’ calendars.

By sharing the music you listen to on Pandora or Last.fm, your tastes can be matched with others or you might be connected directly to the musician to learn what they are working on next.

Placing a photograph in Flickr or PhotoBucket, gives your images a new life. The line between amateur and professional photographer has been wiped out by these services, because almost any image can be purchased or “borrowed” (with the photographer’s permission) for use in a major media site.

Likewise, sharing files no longer even means that you open your computer to strangers. With shared workspace services, such as Amazon Docs and Zoho, documents can be share while they are being composed. Two or three writers can work on parts of the same document concurrently. The proliferation of co-authored books on business and the Internet, for example, offer proof that collaboration is the new norm. Single authors are often sharing their work with readers or editors as they produce it, speeding the process of polishing it for publication.

Yet, sharing only starts with these simple forms. The rise of “social tagging” and bookmark sharing is reorganizing human knowledge. It’s also accelerating the creation of “new” knowledge, some spurious and some enlightening, a mixed blessing indeed if people simply accept the results without question.

As author David Weinberger explains in Everything Is Miscellaneous, the Internet has allowed people to restructure taxonomies and imbue information with different meanings simply by organizing it in new ways, tagging it (placing a keyword on the information that helps people find it) and placing the resulting knowledge online for others to share, and reorganize and tag themselves, facilitates an ongoing debate and an infinitely richer experience of culture.

When a tag helps someone find a community about a topic that they felt deeply about, without being able to talk with others near them about the topic, the social connections on the Internet can transform a life.

In addition to the sites mentioned above, here is a selection of our guides to the best places and ways to start sharing files, music and more via your PC:

• Delicious: Share bookmarks and tags describing any Web page or document
• Diigo: Collect and share bookmarks, tags and document collections
• FileRide: A social desktop for sharing workspaces
• Google Reader: Share bookmarks as an RSS feed
• GrooveShark: Share music as playlists accessible anywhere on the Web
• LibraryThing: Share your favorite books, including tags and ratings
• StumbleUpon: Share bookmarks and tags
• Vimeo: Share and tag your videos

Tags: file-sharing, tagging

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Lenovo Feature Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.