Groups of patients advocating for more research on specific diseases are nothing new. But thanks to the internet, these groups are
rapidly growing in clout. Not only are they able to push for more research on a given disease, but they are able to do things like share information with members and raise funds together. They're also taking a proactive role in medical innovation, as patients can coordinate ad-hoc drug trials among themselves (e.g. everyone keeps track of their side effects and shares them with each other) or find individuals for studies in need of volunteers. One of the things the internet is great at is lowering the costs of coordination among widely dispersed groups. Projects like Wikipedia are an obvious example of this phenomenon, but as this story demonstrates, online coordination can also serve an offline purpose. And it often does; even sites like Facebook and MySpace tangibly help young people, ahem, "hook up". More professional networks are there to help people land jobs or fill vacancies. A site for film photography enthusiasts helped
establish an actual factory for making a certain kind of film that had gone out of production. In addition to the obvious connection between these examples, they also underline the point that the "information economy"
isn't about selling information, but about using it to create value in other things.
