A Glimpse At The Future Of Crowds

Thomas Barnett writes:

Newspapers end their print editions, people download books into their phones, and magazines grow slimmer by the day. And yet information is now more readily and directly available than ever before.

But then look who's complaining: I just wrote a book that involved a ton of secondary-source research, and I haven't set foot in a library in years.

When I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation in the late 1980s, I pretty much lived at Harvard's Widener Library, one of the premier research libraries in the world.

Instead, this time around, I vigorously crowdsourced a lot of my initial effort through my weblog, enlisting the free help of thousands of dedicated readers.

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