Jon Sanders’ insightful column today make an excellent point about how the blogosphere has almost eliminated the costs that used to serve as a protective barrier for the media. If Al Gore had known what the internet would do to Dan Rather, The New York Times, et al, would he have deigned to invent it?
Here’s another point. F.A. Hayek wrote that the great benefit of the free market is that it allows for widely dispersed knowledge to be brought into economic use through the price system. Similarly, the blogosophere enables people who would probably never before have been able to collaborate, to share pieces of information that fit together to make strong arguments about the truth or falsity of important ideas.
