I wrote the piece below for Wikipedia.. but it is doomed for deletion, so i brought my baby here for incubating..
Web Economy relates to a phenomenal social system that governs itself without institutional interference. It encompass a larger area than merely E-Commerce or the Knowledge Economy. It goes beyond just web services or virtual communities. It is been redefined as a new culture that is still anarchic and disruptive.
== The Web Into The 21st Century ==
Prior to the advent of the Web in the early 1990s, the internet has been around but its applications are comparatively minute such as email and mailing lists, confined to closed social spheres such as universitites, certain governmental agencies and closed e-business networks.Since then the Web has grown tremendously, creating sporadic and viral communities that are immensely global, highly agile that constitutes a new social economy that was previously non-existent. The massive number of eyeballs on selective web-sites allow first the borderless advertising economy to leverage in, at explosive speeds, resulting in the first dotcom IPOs such as Netscape and Yahoo! and the eventual buy-over of an ubiquitous email domain - Hotmail.com.
== E-Commerce Revisited ==
Before the turn of the last century, with the advent of institutionalised payment systems and commercially supported physical delivery fulfillment, E-commerce began to take shape with domains such as Amazon.com and EBay.com.The ease of electronic web-access and low cost of adoption by member nations, the world began to develop an addiction for dotcoms, with registrations of URLs happening every few seconds in the late nineties at a feverish rate. The bubble inevitably comes to a head resulting in the great Dot-com bubbleDot-Com Crash in the early 2000s.As the dust settled, the famous 3 C's of Content, Community and Commerce that qualifies entry into the succesfull dotcom club, is reexamined, as it draws a parallel from the 1920s Great Depression. In those years, the sudden discovery of the automobile industry likewise kick up such an investment frenzy, that automobiles of mediocre quality began to flood the market, inevitably bringing about a chain reaction of collapse.Dr. Lester Thurow has described the world economic future as undefinable and yet puts down the internet as ''nothing more than the telegraph with pictures''. Come full circle, the Web Economy suffered the same syndrome of flag planting that lost touch with the community that is spread thin too fast by the explosion of web-pages that didn't do much beyond their name-sakes URLs.E-Commerce confronted real world issues such as credit card fraud, identity theft, and consumer hi-touch culture that requires physical handling of goods before purchase.
== Importance of Community & Tools ==
However the Web Economy remains with the main C - ''Community''. It has since evolved and a second wave of web explosion is emerging that is more clearly defined than before. Today, as of 2006, there are about 1.1 billion web users. Domains such as MySpace and Skype reassert the true meaning of the web community, that is generally regarded as anti-establishment and highly individualistic, quickly forming ''closed'' but globally connected virtual communes.Specialised communities that create Open Source tools and even content such as Wikipedia allow the Web Economy to reflourish unabated turning many former web theories on its head. The new order of the Web economy spawns new areas of lifestyle that has great impact on human behaviour on a large scale that permeates almost every realm.
== Web-based Culture ==
The following are examples of lifestyle areas that are been influenced by the Web.
Consumerism With such a huge market now been targeted along the lines of consumer profiling coupled by more advanced statistical aggregation.
Production The knowledge economy now has a vast resource base such as in the case of Open Source development where a high quality of goods is achieved with seemingly low up-front resources.
Seeking employment via the web Career planning now has a wider range of choices and informational bases to draw better decisions from, aided by profiling tools.
Romance and choice of spouse Again, statistical aggregation comes into play to predict the perfect match.
Social & political behavior Surfers may be subjected to unexpected influences distinctively different from their present surrounding physical culture. Global and web based political campaigns can upstage local politics. CNN news delivered instantly anytime, anywhere, with preferences and opinion pollings.
Leisure and Entertainment now greatly obtainable without restriction via the Web. Materials such as pornography undermined and bypass local laws, and gave rise to new cyberlaws been passed to counter net abuse and redefined legal jurisdiction. Spam also march on in more sopisticated forms.
== See Also ==
*The Long Tail
*Smart mobs
*User generated_content
*Mirc
== Links & References ==
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm Web Internet Usage Statistics
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1738496.stm Internet Starts To Shrink?
http://www.webwritingthatworks.com/DResourcesSITES07viralideas.htm Viral Ideas
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_10/duguid/index.html Peer Production
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