from Amazon.com
This is how I found out that Irishman Sean McCarthy was claiming to have discovered a totally free new energy source: I went to Technorati to search for "Snakes On A Plane," expecting it to be the top search term of the day. Instead, there was something I'd never heard of: the word "Steorn." Snakes was #2, but it was Steorn I was interested in. By this point, I've figured out that if it's high on Technorati it is or will be a big story. So I clicked through and learned that McCarthy'sDublin tech firm has figured out how to generate "clean, free and constant energy from the interaction of magnetic fields" — totally in opposition to the law of thermodynamics — or so they claim via their challenge to the scientific community (aka, "Bring it!") and yesterday's posted 5-minute video. Naturally these claims have met with some skepticism (Australian scientists are so not smelling what Steorn is cooking; and as an astute commenter at MetaFilter points out, the Google vid has been tags like "hoax," "snake oil," "scam," "bs," "not possible," "lies," "crap," and "blarney") but that's not really my point here (though it does make one wonder what kind of viral marketing campaigh Galileo might have busted out with). The point is, this is just one example how the blogosphere is an incredibly sensitive instrument, nimble and reactive, and usually smarter than you are, or at least we are (and, I might add, smarter than George Allen: the 7th most popular search term is "macaca").
That's all, you may return to trolling YouTube now. Lord knows I'm going to.
Update: Here's an interesting response to this post.
