One asked about niche communities and whether there'll ever be another Wikipedia-scale open source research project.

I responded once last night, but it was late, and I didn't have full brain function, so I just responded again.  It's too long and ridiculous a comment for me to leave sitting lonely deep in a thread, and the metaphorical element gets silly, so I'll pull it out and throw it up here...

One more thought about the Balkanization of online communities.

I think there's a key difference between what Wal-Mart and CNN (and Yahoo!) offer and what online communities offer.

Wal-Mart, CNN, and Yahoo! offer (primarily anyway) goods or info for us to CONSUME. 

Online communities offer consumables as well, but, compared to superstores and big box media, they offer huge opportunity for their users to PRODUCE.

Wikipedia is an unusual case.  It's consumed at the 500lb gorilla level, but it's produced by consumers.

I think it achieves its high consumption levels in large part due to the breadth of its offerings, but I think it's important to remember that there aren't that many people that contribute heaps to Wikipedia. Its long tail of contributions is unusually long and thus hugely valuable, but its core contribution community isn't so big to make it unreplicable.

And I think it's also important to remember that no niche contribution community will need to be nearly as big as Wikipedia's.

And important to remember that having very specific barrels into which we can drop our knowledge might be a very good thing for knowledge quality:

Maybe I'm a trapeze genius. I know everything there is to know about trapezes. I hope there exists a small but totally passionate trapeze community that can stimulate and challenge me as I open source my trapeze wisdom. If you throw me in with a bunch of clowns and lion tamers, I might get discouraged by their inability to speak my language, and my trapeze knowledge might never find heirs.

But maybe this rant is irrelevant. Maybe what you really want to know is how we might weave lots of small communities into big, broad info sources for consumption? How we might harness the niche communities to create another Wikipedia or five?

I think we take the trapeze wisdom and dump it into Wikipedia, for one.

And I think we also set up some well designed info aggregators, info organizers, and info synthesizers.

Collect knowledge in the niche barrels, let the people that care most and understand best turn the knowledge to wisdom, and feed the wisdom into broad reaching, cross-referenced enlightenment disseminators.

Maybe?