The Distributed Intelligence of Blogdom

Thomas Lifson has an interesting article in today's issue of The American Thinker about the philosophical underpinnings for the seismic shift the "blogosphere" is causing in journalism. He cites Konnosuke Matsushita who "believed that harnessing the insights and experiences of ordinary people was a more powerful mechanism for change and improvement than any combination of "experts" could offer:

"The wisdom...and ideas of many people must be combined freely and without reserve. Without them, you cannot achieve true success."

On a related theme, Hugh Hewitt notes today:

Had CBS placed the docs on the web beforehand and asked for opinions on their authenticity, it could have avoided this disaster. "Open source" intelligence is the new and increasingly dominant practice in the world of intelligence, just as "open source" software is rising in that field. "Open source" journalism should be the new rule for scribblers as well. The reporters at even these big papers, and the television producers simply don't have the skills sets on display yesterday among the blogs, and it comes back to the same issues and talents that made the internet journalists superior in researching the Christmas in Cambodia story.

We have only just begun to discover the power of the neural network that is embodied in Blogdom.