We all make decisions and judgements based on some data in the form of experiences (own or of others), preconceived notions, or at times based on intution or gut feelings. As far as I am concerned most of my decisions are based on experiences, now since I cant experience everything, the best way is to get to know the experience of other people and assume that my experience would more or less be aligned to those of others in normal circumstances. For example suppose I want to buy a camera, I will go and read some reviews/blogs/articles etc, again the more reviewers agree that a particular camera is good, the easier it is for me decide since increased data set reduces the effect of fliers which might skew the evaluation. For instanace if I read two reviews and one reviewer evaluates the camera with positive note and the other with negetive note. Now for me its difficult to decide since I dont know whom to trust, but suppose I read reviews of 50 people and 45 approves for the camera and rest 5 disapproves of it, then it is easier since I can mark those 5 as fliers.
So I always prefer lot of data, and internet to a great extent helps me with this. I am sure soon, google or some company will come with a review software where you key in a product name and it will tell you how many people like that thing and how many did not. It will also categorize it into different region, so may be in India people like canon camera and in Japan people like Sony camera, etc. All these statistics will make our life easier and also it will help the companies to evaluate and customize thier products.
The underlying phenomena, that would help this happen is internet. More and more people are spending more and more time on internet, that means more and more reviews/blogs/articles/orkut communitites etc. and therefore our decision making process would be faster.
Yesterday just for fun I thought of asking people how much time they spend on internet and the results were really amazing. Though I dont have much data, based on 15 people response it seems that on an average every person spends 8 hours on internet. That means if you remove the the time one is sleeping (lets say 7 hours), he/she is spending 50 % of time in internet. And I guess if you remove the time one spends for food/daily activities/travel, rest of the time is spent on internet. This is really amazing. Imagine the internet was born in 1991 and probably it came to India somewhere in 1996, so within 10 years it has become an integral part of one's life (Again data set is small and taken from engineers/students who always have internet access).
Lets see how the data set looks like for those 15 people who have responded with thier internet usage.
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