Looking back now, after 10 years of living online, what surprises me about the genesis of the Web is how... we all missed the big story.... At its heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing.

The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous.

What matters is the network of social creation, the community of collaborative interaction that futurist Alvin Toffler called prosumption. As with blogging and BitTorrest, prosumers produce and consume at once. The producers are the audience, the act of making is the act of watching, and every link is both a point of departure and a destination.

One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.

How is the notion of community being redefined by social software?

With social software

Closeness is not about space

But shared needs and goals

'Social software' has become a convenient label to group a new generation of socio-technical systems (mostly web based) that facilitate human expression, communication, and collaboration. Examples of social software include content management systems such as blogs, knowledge and collaboration management systems such as wikis, relationship management systems such as Friendster and Orkut, distributed classification systems such as del.icio.us and furl, and the use of RSS feeds to distribute information to specific audiences.

Social software represents the promise of truly networked human communities extending across the online and offline dimensions of reality.

Social software can positively impact pedagogy by inculcating a desire to reconnect the world as a whole, not just the social parts that exist online.

It is the opportunities that social software affords for transferring knowledge between online and offline realms of reality, between local and the global, that make learning as becoming possible.

Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.

"We are herd animals," he says. "These kids are connected to their herd – they always know where it’s moving." Pervasive wireless communication, he believes will "bring us back to behaviour patterns that were natural to us and destroy behaviour patterns that were brought about by the limitations of technology." We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing. Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.