“Your happiness depends not just on your choices and actions, but also on the choices and actions of people you don’t even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from you,” said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study, to be published Friday in BMJ, a British journal. “There’s kind of an emotional quiet riot that occurs and takes on a life of its own, that people themselves may be unaware of. Emotions have a collective existence — they are not just an individual phenomenon.”

If people's emotions are contagious, then what about their knowledge creation, knowledge consumption, and knowledge sharing habits and how might this impact the Information Renaissance?

"In 2007 the digital universe was 281 billion gigabytes large, but the available empty space on hard drives, tapes, CDs, DVDs and volatile/nonvolatile memory was 264 billion gigabytes

That 2007 figure was 10% bigger than expected due to better than expected digital peripheral sales such as cameras and TVs

By 2011 the size of the digital universe will be 10x the size it was in 2006

By 2011 half of all digital information created will not have a permanent home and will just get transferred around

Approximately 70% of the digital universe is created by individuals, but enterprises are responsible for 85% of security, privacy, reliability, and compliance."

This blog posting is the work of myself, Bethany Eldred, Mike Shaffer, and Sangeetha Krishnan.

In a landmark study involving decision-making, researchers asked a panel of three physicians to examine 389 boys to determine if they required a tonsillectomy. These physicians ascertained that 45% of the patients required the procedure, at which point the doctors were dismissed. A second three-physician panel was created and asked to examine the boys who were previously deemed healthy by the first panel (Backwin, 1945, as cited in Carroll & Johnson, 1991).

The second panel determined that 46% of the previously healthy boys needed the procedure. A third panel of doctors were then recruited to examine the 116 boys deemed healthy by the prior two panels of physicians. The third panel concluded that 44% of the twice previously screened boys required the surgical removal of their tonsils (Backwin, 1945, as cited in Carroll & Johnson, 1991).

The date: May 24, 1844. The scene: the Supreme Court Chamber in Washington D.C. The event: Samuel Morse’s first official long-distance demonstration of the telegraph. Encircled by United States Congressmen, the most powerful players of his day, Morse expertly relays the message “What hath God wrought!” to business partner Alfred Vail, who is in the neighboring city of Baltimore, Maryland.

The demonstration was a long time coming. Morse had been working on his invention for over 12 years. “The American Recording Electro-Magnetic Telegraph” would soon change the lives of American citizens and the world at large forever. At a pace no one could imagined, telegraph lines would sprout up throughout the United States and later connect nations throughout the world. This is the story of Samuel Morse and the telegraph that changed the world.

According to Oxford English Dictionary (1989), communication is defined as "the imparting, conveying, or exchange of ideas, knowledge, information, etc. (whether by speech, writing, or signs). This paper attempts to expand this definition by utilizing Dr. Jay Gillette's "Scale of Knowledge" to define human communication.

According to Wang and Plaskoff (2002), knowledge management (KM) is:

… a capability built into the business processes that enables the company to apply and add to what it collectively knows and identify what it doesn’t know. It enables faster and better decision making, problem solving, and work operations to increase productivity and innovations (pp. 115).

Knowledge management is often strongly associated with the use of technology. However, technology is merely the facilitator of knowledge management. Instead, the focus of knowledge management, according to Wang and Plaskoff, is “on people, on processes, and on the organizations that support them” (pp. 115).

Developers of proprietary and open source software typically have different motivations. Proprietary software developers are attempting to directly profit from selling the software while open source software developers typically do not sell their software. This statement particularly holds true for the smaller open source projects, which are driven by individuals working to provide the community at large with open source software that users can then modify to suit their needs.

The following study seeks to confirm the author’s hypothesis that popular blogs are not being used for collaboration purposes, yet internet forums are. It is the opinion of the researcher that significant breakthroughs can be attained in using blogs as a collaborative medium by observing the user behavior in the two mediums and incorporating features of modern Internet forums into weblogs.

Results of this small study (n = 30) indicate that user conscientousness and collaboration is high on popular Internet forums and relatively low on popular blogs. Possible explanations for this finding are hypothesized. Limitations of the study are also discussed.