Original Article: "Is Print Doomed?" – Fast Company.
A great read for those out there who are building a new economy around information, content and media. The debate presents two opposing points of view.
The first is the top-down point of view. John Griffin firmly believes that the average joe will still look to brands for reliable information.
The second is the bottom-up point of view. Jeff Jarvis believes that information will originate from the crowds.
Here are two additional references that might interest you, "herd behaviour" – wikipedia.org and "The Wisdom of Crowds" again on Wikipedia.org. I am very interested in how the crowd can be kept wise through the introduction of a subtle structure. For example, del.icio.us does this by "suggesting" tags that will help the community build social bookmarking.
There are examples where I believe the crowd has failed to stay wise, or its wisdom has been compromised. For those who don't know what digg.com is, Digg is the new Slashdot. You can suggest a story and the community (instead of a team of editors) will decide if the story is going to get anywhere. I thought this was a smart way to capture social sharing of references. However, I believe Digg lacks structure. As a result, Digg's programming section is unfairly skewed towards web programming. Also, at one point of time, the crowd mentality was to continually suggest articles that talked about how Ruby was going to beat other web programming platforms.