If I have seen further, it is by being thrown up by the mosh pit of my peers

With all due respect to Issac Newton, I love Kathy Sierra’s effort to bring his noble sentiment up to date. The always readable Sierra has written a great post about the wisdom of sharing ideas freely, even with competitors, instead of jealously guarding them. She differentiates between Knowledge Sharers and Knowledge Hoarders - especially in the particular flavour of knowledge we call ‘expertise’, and quotes a wonderful line from David Maister’s The Trusted Advisor:

...expertise is like love: not only is it unlimited, you destroy it only by not giving it away.

I’m reminded of the aphorism “knowledge is power” - I think this is generally used in the sense that knowledge gives you competitive advantage. Now, perhaps, it is becoming clearer that advantage comes from the sharing of knowledge.

It occurs to me that ‘tagging’, at the heart of so much social software and Web 2.0 initiatives, is a ‘micro-sharing’ of expertise, increasing the grand total of knowledge with the network effect.