From Biz Stone’s excellent article, The Wisdom of Blogs:
Bloggers are a wise crowd.
- Diversity of opinion – That’s a no-brainer. Bloggers publish hundreds of thousands of posts daily, each one charged with its author’s unique opinion.
- Independence of members – Except for your friends saying “You’ve got to blog about that!” bloggers are not controlled by anyone else.
- Decentralization – There is no central authority in the blogosphere; publish your blog anywhere you want with any tool you want.
- A method for aggregating opinions – Blog feeds make aggregation a snap and there is no shortage of services that take advantage of that fact.
The article goes on to talk about how MIT Media Lab project Blogdex (one of the longest-operating and most-visited opinion aggregators) is like a hive mind of the blogosphere, collectively creating a modern Oracle with no single opinion about anything. Excellent.