Revenge of the Experts

The timing could be right for a new era in Silicon Valley, a Web 3.0. It comes, after all, during dark days for the ideal of a democratic Web. User-generated sites like Wikipedia, for all the stuff they get right, still find themselves in frequent dust-ups over inaccuracies, while community-posting boards like Craigslist have never been able to keep out scammers and frauds. Beyond performance, a series of miniscandals has called the whole "bring your own content" ethic into question. Last summer researchers in Palo Alto, Calif., uncovered secret elitism at Wikipedia when they found that 1 percent of the reference site's users make more than 50 percent of its edits. Perhaps more notoriously, four years ago a computer glitch revealed that Amazon.com's customer-written book reviews are often written by the book's author or a shill for the publisher. "The wisdom of the crowds has peaked," says Calacanis. "Web 3.0 is taking what we've built in Web 2.0—the wisdom of the crowds—and putting an editorial layer on it of truly talented, compensated people to make the product more trusted and refined."

Those with a more tempered opinion say the expert cometh, but only modestly. "I think it's a shift in degree, rather than in kind," says Glenn Reynolds, whose book "An Army of Davids" defends the staying power of the little guy. For curated Internet fare to flourish it also needs to overcome a national distrust of experts that is, in fact, older than the country itself. In 1642, the Puritan John Cotton warned that "the more learned and witty you bee, the more fit for Satan you bee," while in the 19th century, Andrew Jackson and his followers ridiculed learned culture as an affront to the common man. In more recent years the ideal of the noble amateur has been bent to include a general disdain for the professional writer, editor or journalist. But while the tide of investment seems to be shifting somewhat, the nature of the Internet suggests that Web 2.0 populism will never be thrown out entirely. "There's always a Big New Thing, but the old Big New Thing doesn't really go away," says Reynolds. "It becomes just another layer—like we're building an onion from the inside out."

© 2008