If you care about online (and particularly if your business operates beyond the sunny shores of Australia) you need to read China: Ten Things You Should Know About an Online Superpower by Lucas Ng. I’d rank Lucas as one of Australia’s eminent Online Marketing and SEO leaders, so that fact this kind of informed knowledge is freely available makes it purely pants.
A great emergent property of the Internet has been that publishing and accessing content is associated with an extremely low cost barrier. Often cheap as in free. The difficulty is finding information worth something. But as shown by Chris Winfield’s Twitter: Ultimate Time Waster or Great Tool? @ 10e20 Blog you can also work the other way by going out and trying to stimulate the crowd in the hope it awakens emerging data in ways that speak to you. In Chris’s case I think he has ended up with probably the best article for convincing anyone to engage with Twitter.
Using either method, searching for or stimulating the mass, success often comes down to finding an authoritative node and digging around it. Using either method you never know where you will end up but I suspect you will be much more informed within a particular domain of knowledge.
