Tuesday 2 March 2010

Experts online

We live in an age where most information (where I mean know-how and technical data) is available for free if you look hard enough. However, I think we are rediscovering the age of experts. We might be able to get the info ourselves, but we don't necessarily want to spend the time becoming our own travel agents, tax accountants, mechanics or landscape architects. It is usually more efficient to defer to someone who has already spent the time learning about these things and fortunately the internet is very good at putting people in touch with other people.

What it's not good at, however, is sifting the wheat from the chaff. There are as many opinions on the net as there are people, and it's only the true experts who know who the other experts are. So that's our dilemma: we can find experts online, but because we are novices or laymen, we can't tell experts from posers.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There's probably ways to dig up the experts if you look at the conversations they have.
PPS - Or, more specifically, the conversations everyone else has about them.

2 comments:

Hanna said...

yeah, but there's a sense of security and novelty in owning a book on something. Everyone can access the web. Taking information from the web kind of feels like buying something that looks expensive in a thrift shop...

John said...

That's my point about the web. You never can be totally sure that the advice you're getting from a stranger is valuable, the same way something that might look expensive to my inexperienced eye might in fact be rubbish.