I've gone and spotted a phenomena. It's reporters using this idea of a "tipping point" a la Malcolm Gladwell in news articles and the like. For example, yesterday it was E. J. Dionne in the Washington Post with "is there a tipping point, where the presence of Mr. Rove would simply not be worth the unwanted attention that goes with it?" And this morning it was Anne Kornblut in the New York Times with "the issue now is whether the Karl Rove leak affair marks a tipping point in the way President Bush's administration is viewed by the public." A two example phenomena so far, yes, and both in the Rovian context, but I'm going to keep my eyes open.
While we're on the topic of tipping points, I've noticed lately that for more and more things that I google, a link to Wikipedia is among the first or first several results. For example, it's the first result returned in a search for "Karl Rove," the fourth for "Darfur," and the seventh for "World War II." Given the dominance of Google, and given that PageRank rewards resource sites (and as long as we suppose that more people are going to link to an encyclopedia-like site over time than to one particular news story or the like), we should perhaps resign ourselves to a world where things are largely what Wikipedia says they be.
While we're on the topic of tipping points, I've noticed lately that for more and more things that I google, a link to Wikipedia is among the first or first several results. For example, it's the first result returned in a search for "Karl Rove," the fourth for "Darfur," and the seventh for "World War II." Given the dominance of Google, and given that PageRank rewards resource sites (and as long as we suppose that more people are going to link to an encyclopedia-like site over time than to one particular news story or the like), we should perhaps resign ourselves to a world where things are largely what Wikipedia says they be.
