I Heard it Through the Grapevine: MSM Themes Echoing the Blogosphere

This morning I woke up and was reading Gregory Zuckerman's very good article in the Wall Street Journal titled Big Hedge Funds Get Bigger, Leaving Less for Small Rivals when it occurred to me - the key themes he is hitting on I've read somewhere before. Oh yeah, now I remember: on my blog. About nine months ago. The key thrust of his article was touched on in one of my first posts as a blogger titled Where is the Hedge Fund Industry Going? on July 17th, 2006, and most if not all of his subsidiary points were also discussed on my blog over six months ago. Fact.

Now Greg and I have never met and he probably doesn't know of my blog, but it raises an interesting point: just how much stuff do we read in mainstream media that is already written about, processed and commented upon within the blogosphere? And by people who know at least as much if not more about the domain than the mainstream author in question? This is clearly one of the big challenges of search - both online and offline -  today: how do I get synched up with subject-matter experts who have knowledge and perspectives that I can access earlier than when it is written about in mainstream media? The is the goal of several companies, including my own, and represents a major challenge when you consider the sheer scale of the Internet, the need for timely discovery and the importance of sifting the truly excellent sources from those of less merit. We are making headway in solving this seemingly intractable problem but it is challenging, let me tell you. But it is, without question, a necessary and worthy mission.

This morning's experience just reinforced what I already knew and basically validated the last two years of my life. There is a lot of valuable information being offered up by mainstream media. Its just that some of it has already been written about, and written about well, in the blogosphere. And identifying this early information is valuable. And it has to be done. And done well.