Many people, especially the older generation, say that the internet is full of rubbish. That it is more about misinformation and rumours than information.

In a way this is true. As anybody can write something on the internet the average quality of pages published on the internet is inferior to articles in classic media like newspapers and magazines which are written by professionals.

On the other hand the upside of the internet is that it is a democratic medium which assembles much more knowledge than all of the old media together.

The biggest advantage of the internet in my point of view is nevertheless the freshness and the interactivity which manifests itself most in the discussions taking place in the newsgroups and forums. Everything written in one of these discussion groups can immediately be questioned by potentially all internet users. There is a self-correcting mechanism at work which usually separates the wheat from the chaff quite soon.

More or less starting from 9-11 I have been relying a lot on Metafilter for up-to-date information. MeFi is an online community or collective weblog with currently 16,549 members. As you have to register to participate it is quite easy to evaluate contributions by other members based on their past contributions.

On Tuesday Metafilter pointed me to an article in The Weekly Standard about a punk rock festival in California. This article was also referenced by the OpinionJournal, a part of the Wall Street Journal family. The author, a certain Larry Miller, wrote about a friend of his named Jack Burditt who went to the festival with his daughter. The relevant bit started with Miller stating to his friend that he had never heard of a band called Buzzcocks and goes on:

The strange thing after that post is that the people just continued posting as if nothing had happened but after another comment by a festival goer it became obvious that the story was totally false:

So that is why I trust 16,549 people online more than any newspaper or tv station in the world.