Commoditisation of Opinion

The Internet disrupts everything it touches. Now it is the time for the consulting firms to feel the disruption.

Blogging and the blogsphere are commoditising opinion. No longer do you need to pay huge fees to a consulting firm to write a 100 page report (which your not going to read anyway) to tell you about an industry. The same insights are available for free in the blogsphere. This commoditisation of opinion will challenge the value of the major consulting firms.

The commoditisation is only in its early days yet. The lies a problem with trust.

The consulting firms have an implicit trust rating. You trust that they have done their background research and their opinion is based on facts. The blogsphere lacks this implicit trust. Each reader has to form an opinion on the level of trust to assign to each blogger.

The blogsphere needs a explicit trust mechanism.

The trust mechanism is a solveable problem. One which is likely to be solved sooner rather than later.

I wonder if the consulting firms will see this coming?

Tags: disruption, opinion, commoditisation