Jon Udell has once again created some new lines of thought by talking about collaborative documentation and how it scores over the documentation prepared and given with a product by any company.

As he rightly implies, users have enough intelligence to create a documentation that sets the stands in usability and knowledge as they are creating it for themselves! I think it is so shocking that nobody has ever thought of using the brains and understanding of the users till the wikis came into the picture. And given the proliferation of wikipedia, collaborative writing, be it journalism, documentation or a novel, will beat the traditional methods within a few years.

But there seems to be no revenue model for collaborative documentation and I doubt if there are some periphery functions that companies can take advantage and exploit for revenue (like redhat does).

Update:

Just realised how Location based services could best exploit the collaborative movement. Something similar to word of mouth advertising. Only, you dont need to have a huge crowd of friends to know where you will get the finest filter coffee or where the shopkeeper will give you a discount if you praise his dead father. Is anyone implementing any such technology?