THEORY: I think it's entirely possible for bloggers to take control of the global flow of information. We would do this, essentially, by cutting out the middleman. From a network topology standpoint, Mass Publishers are information bottlenecks. What we'll do is we'll allow the Internet to operate as it was designed to do in the case of "damaged areas" permitting of no flow. We will circumvent them.
This incredible opportunity exists today for the efforts of companies like Google. What Google and others have done is turned the conventional broadcast (one-to-many) information distribution scheme inside out. The blogosphere provides for the inclusion of all voices, but it does not aggregate them at any central point. It is the opposite of a bottleneck. The blogosphere is a near-perfect democracy. It not only shows us concensus, it permits for that concensus to change (very quickly!), in response to new information. Even beyond the trust issues, one of the problems with the information output of Mass Publishers is it is rather static, once created. Mass Publishers output new information at a regular and frequent rate, but the bulk of "current" information is always in a tiny minority, against the total information footprint of the Publisher's archive. The only thing that keeps that quite small number of pages at the forefront of visibility on the Web is their Trustrank. In many cases, this trust is deserved. But in many other cases, what keeps us typing in those URLs and giving links to Mass Publishers is the expectation that their information is credible. This needn't be so. Who says there is any reason to trust the New York Times or the CBS Evening News? Remember that we are, all of us, as a culture, still under the influence of the Mass Messages that pervade the other mediums. We're all still making judgements about brands and companies based on their marketing... truth
the truth
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