Well, I guess I'm fucked for the future. I'm extremely skeptical of the value of the "wisdom of crowds". On social sites, I find myself often finding value in

Well, I guess I'm fucked for the future. I'm extremely skeptical of the value of the "wisdom of crowds". On social sites, I find myself often finding value in overlooked comments or articles and, worse yet, often finding little value in the most popular comments and articles. On technical sites, popularity again has little to do with helpfulness, although this has become probably the single greatest ranking metric in search results. For one self-promoting example, a year and a half ago I posted a fix for an annoying osCommerce 3.0 bug (http://robsheldon.com/oscommerce3fix http://robsheldon.com/oscommerce3fix); it never showed up in search results for queries like "oscommerce HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR". That doesn't really bother me, except that every single time I'm banging my head against some obscure problem, in the back of my mind I'm wondering how many little blogs there are out there that have posted the exact solution I'm looking for, except I just couldn't find them if my life depended on it because they aren't ... popular. As an avid hiker and former climber, the last thing I want to do if I'm in unfamiliar territory is be directed to wherever everyone else goes. Hell, I don't even usually want that if I'm doing the tourist thing in some city. Ugh. I'm starting to develop this really powerful sick-to-my-stomach loathing for "crowdsourcing".