Rob McEwan CEO of Goldcorp, he and company geologists knew that their property contained untapped resources "thirty times the amount Goldcorp was currently mining!"

But with 55,000 acres, nobody at Goldcorp could figure out where to look for the buried treasure. To avert a wild goose chase, McEwan shared on the Web Goldcorp's geological data going back to 1948 and offered $575,000 in prizes to those who could come up with the best way to find and extract the gold

Participants in the contest found 55 drilling targets Goldcorp had not identified. Eighty percent hit pay dirt. "In fact, since the challenge was initiated, an astounding eight million ounces of gold have been found" and in four years Goldcorp's cost of production dropped 600%.

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, is not another book about profitless Internet start-ups. The authors want you to take a look at a company involved in one of the oldest industries: gold mining.

 How Goldcorp took advantage of a new economic paradigm they call wikinomics: a model of wealth creation based on collaboration and sharing the authors call “peering”. Wikipedia anyone can read, edit and write encyclopedic on "three million articles in two hundred languages."

Wikipedia relies on its thousands of volunteers and has only has five full-time employees.

Some examples of companies taking advantage of webi-nomics: Discussions of these companies and others are the bulk of recent book Wikinomics.  Wikipedia, is the model for the economic system of harnessing collaborative, external resources, labor and capital to benefit an organization.

•Linden Lab produces less than 1% of the content for its online, virtual society Second Life. The rest is created by players in the game.

•P&G is near its goal of sourcing "50% of its new innovations from outside the company." It says that for every good scientist on salary, there are 200 outside whose skills should be harnessed.

•InnoCentive is a website where companies offer money for solving scientific problems posted online. Freelance scientists can earn up to $100,000 per solution.

•IBM gives labor and money for developing free computer operating system Linux. It then loads Linux on much of its hardware.

•Boeing and BMW open most design work on new products to the companies they partner with.

Interesting quote by Michael Powell, former chairman of the (FCC) Federal Communications Commission, saying, after trying (Internet telephony company) Skype for the first time: "It's over. The world will change now inevitably."