Charlene Li at Forrester Research has a great post on the power of social computing -- essentially computational power based on monitoring social behavior (like where people click, what people blog about, where their attention is going, etc). It is closely related to social software, such as forums, blogs, user-tagging, and user-generated content.

Here's a key quote from Li's post:

Forrester defines social computing as "A social structure in which technology puts power in communities, not institutions." We also believe that three tenets define social computing:

1) innovation will shift from top-down to bottom-up;
2) value will shift from ownership to experience; and
3) power will shift from institutions to communities

Because of this, entrepreneurs should look to use social computing as a tool to attack industries that are driven by top-down, capital-intensive institutions by using bottom-up community-oriented ventures. In such cases, market incumbents will not be able to compete on the social computing front because they are built in a way that is fundamentally incompatible with it.

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