The printing press begot newspapers, posters and novels.

The World Wide Web begot blogs, photos and video to a broad audience.

The printing press, after a few hundred years, brought information to the masses. It took the Web just a few short years to proliferate into ga-zillions of pages and millions of viewers.

Today, I am thinking about the results of the latter proliferation. If everyone can contribute, and contribution is almost free (I recognize that there are costs for cameras, computers, and connectivity, but this is a relatively low barrier. Do you know how much it costs to print and distribute a book!??!), is there any value? Is there value when something is cheap and easily available? Would this entry have more value in China, where it would be harder to get to? Are we all diminishing the value of the web by posting every piece of junk we can think of?

And in this democratization of information, is there a risk that with so much information, so many voices, such a proliferation of choices we will turn to a few standard sources?

Well, not if you’re from high-school to post-grad. Ask Tom.