Groundswell - an Introduction

I am reading a book published by Forrester Research on the effect of Groundswell.

Groundswell in the internet age refers to the use of technologies to influence public behaviour and to foster opinion. The most popular groundswell technologies include: Blog, Wiki, Social Networks (MySpace, Facebook, Friendster), BBS, Forum, and Chat program (Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, AOL, etc).

The book provided many case studies of groundswell effect. A few notable examples include how General Motor (GM) started a blog to market its new products, how the blue-ray disc encryption code was revealed via blog, how Firefox gained a steady growth and captured 25% of market share, how Linux is an open source product which relies on groundswell to determine how it will function.

I will elaborate more on this in my next blog.