Social Filtering versus Social Routing

And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.

from: NYT

Filtering is passive - the use of that particular metaphor shows that the old way of thinking is still there. But the text clearly shows that what the 'friends and online connections' do is an active participation in disseminating the news - it is in fact 'routing' of the information.
My old time 'social routing' metaphor seems more adequate here. But my original vision for it was something even more - it was about building software directly aimed at augmenting the social activity of passing the news. It was about sharing, in a true P2P way, of your information filters and sources and helping others to use them efficiently. It was about personal aggregating and filtering nodes connected to each other outputs that would help us, but not replace us, in directing the news into the outputs. Like interconnected but autonomous personal Diggs.

Flamewars and rationalisation (vi versus emacs anyone?)

Arguments of proponents of some particular technology are often rationalisations. People choose one by chance, because they encounter it first or at the right moment or because some other superficial reason. Then they need to invest a lot of their time to learn it and that makes them to feel connected to the it. No one would accept that that deep connection was an effect of pure chance - so they start rationalise, to think up reasons why. And because deeply inside they know how untrue those arguments are - they seek a 'social proof' and start online flamewars to convince others.