Emergent Chaos

In "More Thoughts On Blogging," Richard wrote about the upsides and downsides: The upside, there's great information, the downside, there's more to sift through.

It feels to me, before I run to Metricon, that that's exactly the value: The filters are in everyone's hands. You do have to look at more, but in doing so, we've got this stunningly emergent phenomenon of millions-to-millions conversations. Sure, there are some uber-popular sites which have large impact on what people see, but it seems to me that many of them (Boing Boing, Instapundit) do by minimizing their own contributions, and acting as routing functions.