Editing. Context. This is the true value proposition on the Net anymore. We’ve got more information than we know what to do with. Now we need curators. (We always did. This is what newspapers and magazines and record labels and publishers used to do for us — pick out the interesting things out of the shit pile and bring it to our attention. Of course, we didn’t always agree with them and there were never enough options. But there are now.)

This is what YOU do, my friend, on the Internet. People read your blog because they like your writing. They think you have good ideas about what’s interesting and good, ideas that extend beyond comics and novels. So you are a trusted contextualizer. When you post about a band you like or a blog you dig or what have you, your opinion is weighted by the whole context of who you are and how you think. Context is what you bring to the table, and that creates what I once called a “taste tribe” — people who respect your cultural context and trust you to tell them what’s good, at least most of the time. You’re a node in a network that includes Matt Jones and Ben Templesmith and the Coilhouse girls and me and Cory Doctorow and Bruce Sterling and all the rest of us who trust one another’s tastes and context, to greater or lesser extent.

Robert Downey Jr. is aboard to play the titular coke-craving big brain of Baker Street in Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes” over at Warner Bros