The Open Web

what does your local mexican resturaunt reviewer and the vetted political blog fivethirtyeight.com have in common?
they were started by the same guy using the powereful and open technologies of the web. This is a good write up on the just what one can do when you can harness the technologies of the web, tech that has changed the way we interact with the vast array of knowledge available at our fingertips.
also touches on the dynamic between academic circles and online blogging communities in disseminating information. As noted in the article the web has changed in what we value when it comes to knowledge. gone are the days of the reclusive sage holed up in the ivory tower, today information does not spread by decree but through the democratizing power of the web to connect. A point debated by traditional newspaper journalists and academics on the legitimacy is as follows:

Mary Coussons-Read, a professor of psychology at CU Denver, says today’s quick turnaround of information helps to make it more compelling.
“Information travels so much more quickly,” she says. “(We expect) instant gratification. If people have a question, they want an answer.”
That real-time quality can bring with it the illusion that it’s possible to perceive a whole reality by accessing various bits of information.
“There’s this immediacy of the transfer of information that leads people to believe they’re seeing everything … and that they have an understanding of the meaning of it all,” she says.

but this idea that academic legitimacy is changing with the adoption of wikipedia as the go to source for much of the general population.

the do-it-yourself nature of much of the most innovative work on the web, and how one can iterate toward perfection rather than publishing works in fully polished states. His tale [this] underlines the principle that good is good, and that the web is extraordinarily proficient at finding and disseminating the best work, often through continual, post-publication, recursive review. FiveThirtyEight also shows the power of openness to foster that dissemination and the dialogue between author and audience. Finally, the open web enables and rewards unexpected uses and genres.