Recess Monkey & the wisdom of crowds
Mar 6, 2007
Bishop Hill in Blogs

Amidst all the hilarity over Recess Monkey's "Maggie Dead" post, the question was put of whether this discredited bloggers. Certainly Iain Dale commenting on the Blogger TV show on 18 Doughty Street thought so.

I must say that anyone who thinks this is missing the fundamental point about the blogosphere. Wisdom is found in the crowd as a whole, not in any particular member of it. For every sloppy blogger claiming that Margaret Thatcher is dead, there is another fool saying that she will live for ever. Both are wrong but their errors cancel each other out. The crowd as a whole moves quickly to the more accurate position that she is alive, but she's getting on a bit. 

So as I commented on Blogger TV, the blogosphere did exactly what it is supposed to do. We shouldn't expect any more from it. 

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