Tim O'reilly is great, sorta

The guy that brings us those great compendiums of information on programming languages recently made a statment in the Oct. 24 Time that disturbed me. Now, perhaps I'm taking this out of context, and perhaps Time did the same, but Mr. O'reilly - a publisher of books- thinks the most life-altering innovation that will happen in the next few years will be collective intelligence. Examples given were Wikipedia, Amazon's user annotation, and Flickr. When asked by the interviewer wheth this collective intelligence might risk "harnessing our collective idiocy" he mentions the "success" of Google's (proprietary!) results algorithms. Technoriati and Google and Flickr and Wikipedia are all great places to find information about what everybody else thinks, but not a place to find intelligence. Intelligence comes from literature written by scholars, not the neighbor kid who has access to Wikipedia.