This also highlights the key difference between journalists and the vast majority of bloggers.
A whole lot of people just posted Kanjorski's video with a few breathless comments. Porfolio blogger Felix Salmon actually took the time to critically examine the claim.
one of the main problems with the blogosphere is that people just cite each other as evidence of legitimacy. When I said that this story was linkbait crap someone linked me to a different site that was using the exact same video for justification.
I don't want democracy to infect the web like it has infected science and everything else. A lot of people agreeing with you means nothing. It might have meant something in the ancestral environment, when convincing everyone made you more powerful within the tribe. But we don't live in tribes anymore.
> A lot of people agreeing with you means nothing.
Of course, that depends entirely on why they agree with you. Perhaps they have independently verified what you have to say, or otherwise arrived at the same conclusions, and agree with you because of that. The problem is the 'information cascade' when more people start agreeing with you just because "all those other people do too".
This also highlights the key difference between journalists and the vast majority of bloggers.
Of course, if you read the article, you might notice the following about the source of the story:
Would you believe: the Sunday New York Post, which on September 21 published a story headlined "Almost Armageddon" featuring this paragraph:
According to traders, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, money market funds were inundated with $500 billion in sell orders prior to the opening [on Thursday]. The total money-market capitalization was roughly $4 trillion that morning.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. I wasn't trying to imply that dead tree media is inherently better than online media. (And certainly not the NY Post)
One sentence in a tabloid apparently led to a youtube clip which led to a huge number of blog posts. Until, finally, one blogger took the time to fact check it.
A whole lot of people just posted Kanjorski's video with a few breathless comments. Porfolio blogger Felix Salmon actually took the time to critically examine the claim.