Web 2.0 reaches Canada

OK, so that title isn’t quite accurate. I could have said “reaches Canadian mainstream”, but that wouldn’t have been accurate either since the “Canada” I refer to is that portion of the population that reads The Globe and Mail, an upscale daily that is the most popular newspaper among Canada’s English-speaking elites.

I’ve been told that, after the front page, the most popular page in the Globe is the back page of the first section, which includes the Social Studies column, “a daily miscellany of information”. (As a result of a call for “healthy proverbs”, the column printed the following by my wife Yvonne Jayasekera: “Eat less, squeeze into dress”.) Today’s column begins with a quote from Alan Sipress in The Washington Post. It’s about the “wisdom of crowds” on the Internet, and mentions Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and his term the “wisdom of the few”: sometimes the crowd’s primary function is simply to vote on who the experts are, after which the crowd is no longer needed.

Now that Canada’s elites have heard of Michael Arrington, is it even necessary for them to hear of Web 2.0?

The next item is about how tattoos are now so popular that they may no longer be cool.