Lee Gomes in the Wall Street Journal’s Portal column posits that the web allows us to spot trends, “disintermediating” the trend setters and trend spotters. I’ve always felt that online forums (CompuServe, Wikis, bulletin boards) could give you more of a sense of the market, the “what’s the man on the street opinion” but accumulators and search engines can turn this from an informal survey to a statistical analysis.