Jake’s comment to Clay’s piece echos many of the points that I raised in my last post on this topic. David Smith’s post does as well.

Authority of information and knowledge is about quality not quantity. You need some way of establishing and representing that one person knows more about something than someone else. I’m as much of a supporter of the common man (and woman) as anybody but the fact of the matter is I wouldn’t want to randomly pull someone off the street and ask them to make the call on whether the space shuttle should launch today or not. You can’t get away from the need for experts.

That said, the real issue is how expertise is established. Educational credentials? Ordination by other experts? Whoever shouts the loudest? This is where my comments about how Epinions works come in.