Everybody's an Expert: Finding Business Experts Online

In a web-enabled world where everyone sounds authoritative and where expertise may be devalued, locating a real expert can seem more impossible than finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. When anyone can claim expertise and when so many people do, it almost seems as if everyone is an expert!

This

is what Andrew Keen bemoans in his book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture (the subtitle is expanded in the British version to How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy) and on his blog (http://andrewkeen.typepad.com). As a Web 2.0 skeptic, he's no fan of user-generated content unless that creator is educated, trained, skilled, knowledgeable, or otherwise qualified as an expert to contribute content in digital form.

It sometimes appears to librarians that in the past we had perfect reference works. We worked and lived in a mythical age when all published reference tools were fair, true, and comprehensive. Yet anyone who has spent time looking at reference works knows that there was no such time. Perhaps because there were fewer written sources in more stable formats, there was an illusion of authority and comprehensiveness. Perhaps because we could not know the extent or the range of expertise in an area, we judged based upon what we had-and that seemed sufficient. In finding reliable information, the problem with finding experts is separating the wheat from the chaff. In today's digital world, there's just a lot more grain out there to winnow!