Encyclopedia Blogtannica

Remember the old days when the Encyclopedia Britannica was the authority on everything, and every family had a set of these important books? No? Ok, I'll take you back down memory lane. It used to be that during the golden age of door-to-door salesmen, the Encyclopedia Britannica was guaranteed to get a sale in almost every home he visited. Parents wanted their kids to have access to the most authoritative source of information available. This was really key when doing homework assignments and they were fun for general reading also.

Now for the new days of the Wikipedia and the World Wide Web in general. I give credit to the Wikipedia in terms of concept, if not for the drawbacks of the implementation. Anyway, the crux of the matter is that all the web sites that all the Big Searchers do such a good job of indexing is nothing more than a giant bulletin board of unverified information. The "machines" don't know a fact from an opinion. In fact, I can create a web site that appears to offer authoritative information, but could in fact be completely bogus.

So here is what we are reduced to in the World Wide Web Space: finding people who are as confused or as eccentric as we are. Yes, it all just becomes a social interaction club. I know in the hiearchy of knowledge that the World Wide Web will never equal the authoritative content of the old encyclopedia products. I know that when I do a search for something, I have to apply my "junk content" filter to everything that comes up. I know that what comes up first is the result of SEO scamming. I have to apply inverse-SEO logic go my queries so I can find something that is exactly what I want.

Is there an easy way out? No. When you listen to the news, you know you are being talked to by a producer who is crass, sensationalistic, panders to sexual urges and whose interest in the context of an event and other sides to the issue comes in dead last in its presentation. Remember when you used to think Walter Cronkite was authoritative? Now I have a ditsy little 23 year old college graduate whose vocabulary tops 1,000 words with great makeup and incredible cleavage explaining complex world issues to me in three sentences.

So it is natural to turn to the web because you free from a news broadcast that forces you to watch twenty-seven minutes of commercials to see ten minutes worth of news which you have to wait until the very end of the broadcast to see. I refuse to let these idiots waste my time. So when I go to the web, I expect to get more content. I do. But I also found that most news outlets filter the news in such a way that I know for sure politics is the main influence. So now that I know I'm being scammed here too, I end up looking at opinions in people's blogs, because a blog is a personal sharing (usually). And someone sharing a personal opinion is already not claiming to be authoritative, but as a word-of-mouth source, we give them great weight. So that is why blogs are the number one source of information on the Internet today.

Those who we consider methodical and put forward well reasoned arguments become authoritative in our minds. And in each case, we follow those blogs which provide us with the information we value or which entertain us. So I conclude the following, that the Encyclopedia Britannica has been supplanted by the Encyclopedia Blogtannica. Are we better off now than we were before? I don't know...I'll let you know when we get there.