Will they be smart enough to do this? That remains to be seen.

Also, social proof is indeed key. I would hate to have this sort of “movement” produce a breed of armchair woodworkers. The hope is that with all of this information, you can get your answers/inspiration fast and get back out there to make it happen at the workbench.

Thanks for showing up.

Sounds like someone’s been reading Gary V.?

One area of concern that I have is when we start to look at more dangerous aspects of our craft – the use of finishes and the safety required to use some of them properly is one example. Another is whenever we interface with mains electricity or something else that is inherently dangerous and subject to regulation. Frankly, this is an area where I start to get very scared about ‘advice’ from the internet. Take for instance the confusion on what the new requirements for testing of finishes on toys in the US require. Yes Tom Iovino clarified it, but there are how many posts on this issue that give differing interpretations of what the true position is? I know from my own experience as a writer of legal texts that commercial publishers take great care in this sort of area to ensure that the advice they give in regulated areas is complete and accurate at the time of publication. Frankly, the advice I see on this on the net is at best of curate’s egg qualtity (ie some of it is good); sometimes it is plain wrong and dangerous and most frequently it is misleading (usually by omission of information rather than by outright falsehood).

That variability in quality in areas that are dangerous or likely to lead to liability of internet ‘advice’ is a consequence of the low barrier to entry to the internet. But it tends also to indicate why the ‘authoritative’ advice in many areas will remain with the commercially published product – someone who makes money out of providing the information has a real incentive to get it right (if only to protect his assets) and the resources to ensure that it is right. That commercial publication may be on the internet or in hard copy, but it is unlikely to be from the free forum and blog sites (let alone the social netwrking sites).

Don’t get me wrong – social networking and the blogoshpere are fun and give me interesting thoughts to pursue and I really enjoy sharing experiences with woodworkers from all over the world. This is valuable and enriching. It complements the authoritative sources of information. Sometimes blogosphere information can be authoritative because of who writes it – eg if it concerns saws and is written by Mike Wenzloff, but most of it is only as authoritative as a diary entry.

For me, I wouldn’t give up my Fine Woodworking subscription for anything. I find it to be one of my best sources of inspiration. The problem is, no matter how well written an article is, there will always be follow up questions and the days of writing a letter to the editor of the magazine to find the answer are over. We all demand instant answers. If those folks can’t make themselves more accessible to the layman, we’ll find other sources. Personally, if I run into a problem midway through a project, my first source for help is a Twitter message or an email to Adam or Marc or someone that I’ve come to trust. I’d love to have that same kind of access to the editors or writers of the articles I read. However, just adding their Twitter name to an article won’t cut the mustard. The magazine experts need to be actively involved. They need to be interacting daily with the online community so that we know who they are and learn that they too are a trustworthy source of help and information. Because, let’s face it, a well written article is only half of the information and training that woodworkers have come to expect.

The obvious problem here is that we need to run the internet “experts” through our own vetting process and then share what we find. Woodworkers are not typically gullible bunch, we don’t run out to buy everything we see in every add of our favorite magazines, we wait for those magazines to do a review of those products before we make a choice to buy. Why would anyone assume that we’d take everything we find on the internet as gospel? We’ve learned to rule out the “Snake-oil” salesmen in the real world, why would anyone assume that we wouldn’t do the same in the digital world?

So ring it in from every street corner that 2010 is the year of the Internet woodworker. The variety of opinions and styles of work cannot be matched by an army of publishers because we outnumber them. Let us the masses remember to get off our computers and into our shops however so that we don’t all become armchair woodworkers. With so much information at our fingertips it would be a shame to not use it and make some shavings and dust!