Times was, I used to be able to spout off any random factiod I thought I knew, and the Internet took it as read truth. The Wikipedia used to be great for this. Now, my rants are pretty much limited to the blarg you’re reading right now– we’re probably all better off for it. Most university professors scowl very deeply if a student references the Wikipedia in a footnote, which is fair, but not for the reasons most people think: Wikipedia is a bad reference source because it’s a derivative work, not because it may be inaccurate: The student should be citing the original work, not someone’s summarized boilerplate. Wikipedia has largely squashed the ‘inaccurate’ label through a zealous use and requirement of all statements must have footnotes.
But that raises a conundrum for many of us: where is truth? Where is the expert? Is the expert the one with the most experience? Is the expert the one with the most money? The most devotees? Is truth simply the mob’s consensus? Graduate school told me that truth is the logical sum of a tested thesis. I spent 15 years being smug that I knew what that meant, only now to really see that when the Internet gave everyone a soapbox from which to preach, now social networks are giving everyone a Hyde’s Park corner complete with audiences. Companies like bazaarvoice and pluck are setting up these cacophonies wherever possible (good for them). These systems invariably include meta-rating systems to rate the reviews and the reviewers, in the hopes of crowdsourcing the good information from the bad. In general, it usually works. It is still, however, all based on a Kuhn-model of mob truth.
The NYT recently published an article on a new computer named “Watson” designed by IBM to play Jeopardy. Another possible use they summized might be to find counter-factual statements to anyone’s gtiven declaration on the Internet. In short: a bullshit detector. I can imagine they will be able to monetize this thing into millions of dollars: every social network and review thread can now come with a robot that can read plain speech, offer immediate counter-responses to erroneous information, and perhaps even show us a numerical score for ‘trustability’ or ‘truthiness‘ (all the footnotes in that link– irony!). The downside here, of course, is that most reviews for most products will be reduced to little more than the barren subjectivism of American Bandstand: “It’s got a good beat, I can dance to it.”
There is still salvation for quality content in quality reviews: hard numerical data, solid logic, and qualitative feature polarization. I’ll explain myself on those in some upcoming posts.
I recently came back from an extended stay in my other home, Tokyo. While there ,we did the usual daily things: ride the train, buy groceries, get lunch, eat sushi, watch Godzilla movies (well, okay, just once). Here’s the thing: we only used a credit card maybe 3-4 times over 10 days, and used actual cash even less. Everywhere we went, we used our 
That last point is the killer. To buy anything, all we had to do was tap this thing inside a circle on the glass counter, as if we were beknighting the transaction, done. Meanwhile, a credit card requires a swipe, a printout, the hostess signing the receipt, and we (the buyer) countersigning. I know that some US places are just accepting the one swipe under a given amount (no signing required under $25 or so), but it’s still slower.
As a kid, I remember how cool it was that we had two phone lines (a luxury in the 1970s). At the time, I figured it was to facilitate compromise amongst the children, so we could use both at the same time. Now I realize (and remember) that we weren’t supposed to use the first line, it was for the hospital, in case they needed to contact my physician father. Many times Dad would ask my mother for a ride to see a patient in the middle of the night, or take long phone calls from patients as they talked through their ailments.
In his career, Wally Jenkins M.D. saved thousands of lives. He mentored dozens if not hundreds of medical interns. He fixed more boat engines while up to his armpits in cold Jackson Lake water than any man I know. He gave up medical junkets to exotic locales in order to save up vacation time for week-long adventures through the national parks. At 17, he skipped his high school graduation dance in order to be on a troop train to Chicago to serve in the waning months of WWII.
We’re seeing a pattern, in political town halls, industry conferences, and even award shows: the concept of a “panel of experts” at the head of the grand ballroom dispensing wisdom to the masses’ is dead. I blame mobile phones, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
The haters are out, there is 
Every year, the geeks declare ‘
Google is worth 
OSCommerce, long in the tooth and somewhat widely distributed with 200,000 known stores, has 
I promise I'm relevant 
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