NETWORKING AND COLLABRATION
A relatively new phenomenon, online networking and collaborationhas caught on fast because of its impact on small businesses
and professionals. Networking sites such as www.Ryze.com and
www.Orkut.com have developed into business networking sites from simple ‘get to meet more people’ sites. These sites let you browse through individual profiles separated into different categories.
There are also sites targeted at specific professions, such as
Writer.net which is aimed at writers and potential publishers.
Others, such as deviantart.com, concentrate on visual art.
There are other sites aimed at programmers and computer
professionals. Apart from networking and getting various
employment or work-related opportunities, these sites also
allow interaction within the community and lead to the birth
of new ideas.
Networking and collaboration tools have helped professionals no end
A related development on the Web is the birth of sites such as
twiki.org and jotspot.com, which act as online project management
sites. They act as the user’s own private intranet. The wiki in
these sites make them very easy to modify and customise as per
the user’s need. Twiki, for example, is an online enterprise collaborationsite. It is designed to run a project development space, a document management system, a knowledge base, or any other
groupware tool on an intranet or on the Internet.
The increasing use of technology in small business and projects
has lead to a large exchange of ideas, and has given birth to
collaborative efforts such as wikipedia.com and Wikinews. This
has also transcended the virtual world and has gone into mainstream
media. Daily newspapers such as Ohmynews of Korea are
testament to the fact that collaborative efforts from the Internet
can be carried forward into the real world.