RATHERGATE

As anyone who is following the blogosphere (and to a lesser extent the mainstream media) at all knows, the memos CBS published on 60 minutes detailing President Bush's Nation Guard service were fakes. Pretty much the only person who hasn't reached this conclusion, or at least won't admit it, is Dan Rather himself. I expect this event will be talked about for a long time. Blogger triumphalism will reach ever new heights and CBS and the media in general will continue to be lambasted as overly liberal. The interesting thing to me is that we are looking at a new way to find and process information. Not blogs in specific, more the internet in general. I think we often fail to understand the power of some of the tools at our disposal, even as they are changing the way the world works as we watch. Google gives us at an instant access to more information then a major research effort, spending huge sums of money and taking months, could have accomplished just a few years ago. Howard Dean demonstrated last year that a slightly wacky candidate with little establishment support can become a major player in politics simply by leveraging the power of the web to connect like minded individuals, connections that produce, rather than cost, campaign funds. These examples show a dramatic shift in power from organizations to individuals, it is a change that I expect will shift business, politics, and personal lives in huge ways over the coming years.