Just a couple of weeks after House featured an episode about a blogger who sought the wisdom of the crowd to help diagnose her extraordinary affliction, a nonfictional internet leader — the brilliant Jonathan Zittrain — came down with mysterious symptoms that his doctors were unable to diagnose. Carefully, guardedly, with the cooperation of his doctors, Zittrain let out on the Net a description of his circumstances and symptoms, and in a matter of hours, his online consultants had tracked down an obscure article that seemed to identify his own health problems.
Now, Zittrain takes pains to underscore his doctors’ excellence, and the fact that they were zeroing in on the same diagnosis on the basis of extensive testing (unlike the testing on House, which the doctors themselves perform and which yields results in minutes). But still — that internet is some amazing stuff.