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I was at a party (with great chocolate) on Saturday night and among the conversational knots I joined was one dedicated to blogs. "I don't really read them," one woman said, "because I don't know which are the good ones." 

This made me think about watching my brother-in-law trying to make a choice at our local Ben & Jerry's. After agonizing over Coffee Heath Bar Crunch vs. Cherry Garcia or Dublin Mudslide, Terry ended up getting vanila because, as he said, "I know what it is."

Marketers of all stripes all acknowledge that no matter how much advertising or hype they put out there, word-of-mouth among people who know one another is always the best way to get someone interested in a product or idea. That's why large websites such as Amazon and Netflix use a system that gives you recommendations for products that match your search. Yeah, it's cross-selling. But it's also the web equivalent of word-of-mouth supported by reviews written by anyone who takes the time to limber up their keyboard.

So here we sit in the muddle (nope, that's not a misspelling) of an information glut and what do I read in the newspaper yesterday? That just across the border in New Hampshire, most of those voters (some 69%) are talking to one another about who they will be voting for tomorrow. In fact, they are looking to one another for information and opinions, ignoring (for the most part) the continual blather on their TVs and the constant ringing of their telephones.

Interesting, isn't it, that the more we use technology, the more we rely on one another for information. Does that make local the new global?