I wrote this thought on February 29, 2008, but it’s a timeless observation.

Today at lunch I was considering why the internet is so revolutionary.
I was going through it with Michael and I came up with the following:

The Internet is a public forum (1) with a lower entrance hurdle (2) that is accessible to the entire  world (3), made searchable by Google (4) and validated (with an archive of the validation) by other people (5).

Footnotes:

(1) A public forum is a place where people can broadcast and/or exchange ideas like talking on a soap box on the street corner, having a TV show, a local radio program, or a town hall meeting.

(2) The lower entrance hurdle means that the cost to make a website is minimal.  It is less than making a TV show and setting one up is more easily done than most other public forums.

(3) Your forum is accessible to the entire world with the internet.  Prior to the internet, putting your message into a public forum was usually local or regional or national at best.  Rarely was the message so easily accessed by the whole world.

(4) In the past, even if you kept a record of your message, the information archive was not “centralized” and searchable.

(5) The sites are validated by hits.  Information (wikipedia, etc) or products are validated by ratings and rankings (like eBay, Amazon, etc) by users.  These individual ratings remain forever so the aggregate data serves as a reinforced “word of mouth.”  In the old days we only had real ‘word of mouth’ validation and for that we had to depend on those
close to us (not the aggregate of 1000s of people) and it wasn’t archived so that we could interpret that “word of mouth” at the moment we searched for the product/information.