Knowledge is power, and as we move from the industrial economy to its digital successor, power is steadily moving away from the corporation toward the consumer. This is really the heart of the debate around the small but powerful piece of Internet software called Third Voice. When other Web users running the Third Voice software visit the site, they will see little red triangles that indicate someone else's comments are annotated. Click on the triangles and up pop the notes.
Nothing is changed on the Web site itself.
The comments are all stored separately on Third Voice's servers. Accordingly, Web page administrators have no control over the material stuck to their sites. The software was originally damned by many as useless electronic graffiti, particularly because the notes tended initially to be juvenile or abusive. But the random graffiti is really a trivial issue, and the software's creators are exploring ways to filter out such junk. The implications of Third Voice are much more dramatic when you appreciate that it could be systematically used against your company.