Ten years ago, when you wanted to know about the history of Blood Sausage, or who was prime minister of Britain in 1899, you searched for it (you didn’t Google it). You found a couple pages talking about roughly what you were discussing, and you read them pretty carefully — blue comic sans on a yellow background, hosted by Geocities, could be the best source.

Now, you Google what you’re looking for. The first result is almost always Wikipedia, and that’s almost always enough. But what about the other sources? Is blue Comic Sans on a yellow background The Mark of the Beast?

For me, 90% of the time, it is. If someone hasn’t bothered to come up with a clean, consistent design, it’s not worth my time to figure out if they did their homework or not.

The Internet was supposed to make information sharing more democratic because there were no barriers to entry. You didn’t have to get a book designer or find a distribution deal to get your ideas out there. And yet the Internet, as it’s used today, is just as undemocratic. Now, instead of getting to write for The New Republic, you have to get to the front page of Daily Kos; instead of getting quoted in The Wall Street Journal, you have to get a mention on TheStreet.com.

So we’re back where we started, in a way. The biggest difference: before, most of the cost of distribution went to stuff like paying to print up books and ship them around the country. Now, most of that cost can go to paying the gatekeepers to let creators in — which means they can send more of their time building a community that wants the kind of content they’re creating.

Which is great. We were moving bits all along; the fewer atoms we move in the process, the better.