Selling the Wisdom of crowds

In a rather long post on his blog, Jeff Jarvis gets it just about spot on. I'd also have to agree, more or less with the comments of KirkH on the same piece.
I posted a related item to this a few days ago, where my point was not so much about crowd wisdom, as about the creation of consensus. People make a statement or a prediction, or they produce the 'Ultimate Chill out session' on iTunes or post some radical photography on Flickr and people buy into it (or not).

Public reinforcement through consumption, and rehashing or forwarding, can bring any content to the fore, viewed by millions.

The thing is that time is less of a factor here on the internet than before we were all online. I'm going to call this phenomenon the 'Long Truth', after the original concept of the Long Tail which is an often misinterpreted theory about how sales of particular items, over time, can outsell the current favourites, even if they were not popular when released.

Think about it. We are all expressing ourselves publicly on the internet by creating content and over time it may, or may not, be considered good, or valuable or just plain true!

All of my blog entries over the last 6 months may not have achieved a large audience and there is no consensus agreeing with the opinions I have voiced (except the ones I rehashed), but there is now a repository of content out there that could spring back to life at any moment, if the conditions in the internet are right.

I can comfort myself in the knowledge that I may be right; in the end.