Posted by: Luke in Wikinomics, Web2.0, Knowledge Management on Dec 6, 2008
It's a know fact that most health practitioners, lawyers and accountants tend to get business by way of personal referrals. This would obviously imply that unless they continued to do a good job that they would go out of business. Without perfect information flow this is not the case and we all know that there is no such thing as perfect information flow.
The other thing we need to take into account is that professions do tend to protect themselves wherever possible which further stifles the flow of perfect information. I have also noted that in certain countries there are professions where the blatant public (web) qualification of individuals is prohibited by law. These laws are in countries which promote free speech and equal opportunity no less.
With the new web there are certain Web sites which are gaining traction allowing you to view and give ratings and comments about individual practitioners in these fields. Here is a site where you can rate a doctor for example: http://www.doctorrate.com/ and there are others.
So where does this leave us? The world continues to get smaller, flatter and more transparent. It also means that professionals need to be able to retaliate any web retribution as quickly as possible not to mention the fact that they need to be made aware of it. Will Doctors end up having individual Bloggs to retaliate and PA's to sift the net for slander?