For example, the traditional news media fells threatened by individual hobbyist bloggers. One of the most prolific news bloggers I follow provides a great deal of content about my part of town that I find very useful. But how do I know what information the blogger chose to leave out?

Recently the blog featured a report on two traffic accidents, complete with pictures. Were these traffic accidents more newsworthy than any other accidents in the neighborhood, or were they reported on simply because the blogger had pictures of them and wanted to share? I have no way of knowing, and in that sense I’m as blind about this particular information source’s omissions, biases, and flaws as I am about any traditional media outlet’s.

In an environment where anyone can publish anything, and there is no single path of access to what they publish, how can meritocratic quality be determined? In Open Source it’s a process of source code control and review: the code is managed through a tree model, in which the trunk is the official release, and individuals working on it copy the project to their own branches to work on. When they submit branch code back to the trunk, it gets reviewed and tested for bugs before it can become part of the official release.

Information is different from code. There is no source control software for information, although the Wiki model does provide some loose management processes. Buggy information can, and does, spread like wildfire even if those who have better information try to stamp it out. I’m sure we can all think of situations in which buggy information has had worse effects than buggy software ever has.

If we want to abstract the Open Source software development model to digital media, do we need a means of information source control, to distinguish reviewed and tested information from information that’s experimental or otherwise under development? Or is that counter-productive and stifling?

On a tangent, something to keep in mind when talking about Open Source as a recent phenomenon is how the desktop computing revolution was driven by computer hobbyists back in the 1970s. Back then, most programmers were distributing their work using a traditional intellectual property model (which was frequently unenforceable), but there was a clear parallel in that a lot of intellectual energy was being created during evenings and weekends.

Even as the innovation of that time led to a crisis at IBM and other established computing companies, it also made possible the emergence of new powerhouses, such as Microsoft and Apple. With the Internet making worldwide collaboration on software feasible, Open Source projects can be seen as an outgrowth of the in-person User Group meetings where the early desktop hobbyists shared ideas, then went home to implement them on individual projects. Now, the implementation happens collaboratively in real time on the code itself, and monetizing the output (if it happens at all) comes through offering services rather than the IP copyright model. The result is an amazing creative boom happening outside of the control of the major companies in the industry, who then scramble to keep up.

In writing this I’m reminded of how the development of the Hollywood film industry was fueled to some extent by its remoteness from Thomas Edison’s New Jersey headquarters, making it harder for Edison to enforce his patents on movie-making equipment. In the end, Edison and his associates were ruled a monopoly and lost out on the motion picture boom. I’d be curious what other emerging media and technologies have followed similar patterns. Could It be a repeating lesson that the majority of business leaders never quite learns?