Web 2.0 as a Zeitgeist Gatherer

Web 2.0 has ushered in technology that purportedly lets us know what’s popular in the world. With a plethora of social bookmarking sites like flickr using the concept and industry leaders like Google using the term Zeitgeist as a service, can we really know the “general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of [our] era?”

Some questions:

1) Does “popular” really mean collective consciousness, as some of the social bookmarking sites imply?

2) How should we in the faith-based / non-profit arena use technology advances that allows us to find out what is (at the least) top of mind to people who use websites?

Some starting points:

• Collective intelligence theory
• Communication Theory and Web 2.0
• Tag clouds
• Folksonomy
• Adam Mathes on Folksonomies

Hmmm…lot’s to think about. Let me know of other sites who talk about this.