Big News sites vs. word-of-mouth

Written May 27. 1999, at 01:00 GMT.

(Rant that leads to nowhere)

According to writer Doulas Adams "bad news" is the only thing capable of travelling faster than light. There's some truth in that. And now that we have the Internet, all news can.

The Internet is an extremely powerful communication tool, and it makes word-of-mouth quite viable method of sharing information, again. I don't need CNN to tell me everything that's going on, much of what I know I've "heard" from someone else.

This makes me start to think that big newsites are becoming less and less important. We don't need them as much as we did once, and as the on-line community matures we'll need them even less. What we'll still need, however, is someone we trust to verify the truth of what we've heard. Some person or institution with the reputation of knowing certain stuff for sure and telling the truth. Size does not neccessarily mean trustworthiness.

More like this: English Entries, .