Clay Shirky has a great chapter in his book titled “Publish First, Filter Later." The gist is that when publishing was expensive (print a book or newspaper, bind and collate, distribute to reader, etc) there was no alternative to filtering first, i.e. figuring out what to publish. With the Internet, the cost of publishing is essentially zero, so anything can and should be published with the filtering taking place later. The web at large of course illustrates this, but it’s true in specific ar...
