Amateurs vs. experts on the Web
Crowd-sourcing has its place, but specialized professionals will always have more credibility for many users.
It's always fun to speculate which trend is poised to "take over the Internet," as the PR people like to say, then watch as the pendulum swings back to its opposite, and so on, until things even out. This time it's "crowdsourcing," or taking a task and outsourcing it to a large group of people. In journalism or science, management or market research, users want specialists. Then they want amateurs. Then they see the value of specialists again. And so on...
For more detail, read the story in Newsweek: "Revenge of the experts"