Chris Andersen writes a piece that I recommend you to go read in full, to prevent me from quoting it here in full.

 

With clients and others I often have a hard time explaining my information strategy when it comes to blogreading and e.g. searching stuff on the web. When I explain to them that I don't look at individual information-items but hunt for the large scale patterns, and the subjective and opiniated pointers to other sources they often reply with something like "But that only yields untrustworthy information". Of course I know that on the level of the information object itself (a posting, a quote, a pointer etc) the information is most likely not entirely accurate or even false. But I navigate the patterns and for that the points that make the pattern don't have to be all accurate themselves, it only has to be correct at a aggregate level.

 

When I start drilling down towards individual pieces of information, that info itself has to be correct. For evaluating that I use its social and human context, so that to me information can never be judged only in and by itself. But doing that is a totally different information strategy.

 

It is key that we are able to distinct between these different approaches and switch the information strategies we use accordingly. It is a subject I have covered here before, and that I am eager to discuss at any given opportunity.