When I was at the gym a few days ago, I read the New York Times magazine that someone had left in the magazine racks. The cover story was about how wikis and blogs could change how we gather intelligence in the future, and I thought, “I actually have some experience with wikis and blogs-- I might understand this!” and read the whole article on the elliptical trainer. Alas, the article, which is called “Open-Source Spying,” is now archived, so you can only access it if you have TimesSelect. So much for open sources, NYT...

Basically, one of the big problems facing the various U.S. intelligence agencies-- the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, you name it-- is the difficulty of sharing information between agencies. There is a program called Intelink that tries to promote this sort of information sharing, but because no agency requires that its analysts post anything to it, it’s of limited use. Our intelligence agencies, as you may recall, took quite a lot of (probably justified) heat after September 11 when it was discovered that individual analysts had been in the possession of clues that, had they been shared, might have been able to foresee or prevent the terrorist attacks. Information-sharing is also more important today than it used to be during the Cold War because security threats materialize much more quickly and because these threats are global in nature, so one person can’t be an expert in them-- you need many people collaborating to get a full picture.

No mind-bending explorations of theory from me this time around. Actually, I wandered across wikiHow whilst procrastinating, and I thought I'd pass it on. An interesting knowledge base, from how to gain the trust of a recently abused horse, to how to appreciate death metal. Joking aside, it looks like a nice use of this kind of community software.

I found this amusing and thought that you guys might appreciate it, given our current discussions about social software. :-)