I’ve been thinking a lot about participatory culture recently as I’ve been desperately trying to get up to speed with all the exciting things happening online. Just watched the video below from a TED talk by Howard Rheingold. It’s fascinating to think about how so many of the new systems and sites use collaboration to work – in fact the more people that use them the better they work for everybody – from the folksonomy of tagging to the hive mind of Wikipedia to the server network of BitTorrent. I feel like a hopeless dilettante in this arena but I love it all too. Here’s the vid: