Gas Price and the Web: Volunteers Chart Bargains

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Gas Price and the Web: Volunteers Chart Bargains

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Tim O'Reilly
Aug. 29, 2004 10:27 AM
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If you've been following my latest thinking, you know that I believe that one of the true lessons of open source is not necessarily making source code available, but harnessing collective action on the net, building, if you will, an "architecture of participation."

In that context, MIT's Tech Review has an interesting article about gasbuddy.com, a network of collaboratively created sites for keeping track of the gas stations with the cheapest gas prices.

The creation of collaborative databases--and the namespaces associated with them--is one of the trends that is going to have enormous impact on our economy, and will be one of the major elements of what I've been calling Web 2.0 and "the internet operating system."

Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world, and an activist for open standards. O'Reilly Media also publishes online through the O'Reilly Network and hosts conferences on technology topics, including the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and the Web 2.0 Conference. Tim's blog, the O'Reilly Radar "watches the alpha geeks" to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. For everything Tim, see tim.oreilly.com.

Do you have any other good examples of collectively created databases? (The original CDDB, IMDB, and even the DNS are examples that quickly come to mind.)
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Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

Taking the Time to Report
2004-08-29 20:04:17 mikebaas [Reply | View]

Seems the biggest obstacle to get something like 'gasbuddy' to really work well would be having the Internet at your fingertips as you happen to be getting gas. I don't really understand the kind of person that is going to take time to remember the price they paid for gas, write it down, go home and get online, login to 'gasbuddy' and report their price. Maybe people are much more altruistic than I am. I just don't want to have to one more thing to do before bed like logging my gas prices on 'gasbuddy'. Seems it does work well without my participation but I still don't understand it.

mb

Taking the Time to Report
2004-08-30 11:51:23 tungwaiyip [Reply | View]

Good point. There're just too much hassle for majority of people to particate in feeding input. But do give the website a check. There is indeed a good amount of information available. Although average person would not bother with it (perhaps just use it to check the price), there are enough enthusiasts who would go far enough to actully get online back home and feed useful information into the system.

The success of a system has much to do with building a community rather than the software system. The higher participation level it has the more useful the database would be. Which in turn raise the profile and attract even more participation. In gasbuddy there is a score system that motivates volunteers to feed data regularly.

Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

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