Best of everything instantly available

The Web may turn consumers into a nation of know-it-alls.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
You want to find the best restaurants in Belize and the best vacuum cleaner to fit your budget. And what was the Oscar-winning film "Crash" about anyway?
You know what to do. Go online.
It's what the Finland-based agency Trendwatching dubs "INFOLUST," a trendy craving for information that is only becoming more frenzied as the facts become more available on the Web. Information is empowering, the company says in an e-mail report. And savvy consumers want to know the cheapest, the best and the coolest.
"Micro publishing" is on the rise, for instance. A gadget blog, www.gizmodo.com, gets more than 350,000 hits per day.
Good and bad
For the best prices, consumers use www.pricenoia.com or the equivalent. For travel, people not only want cheap deals, they want to know what to do. The site www.tripadvisor.com is said to have more than 4 million reviews. They find the good and the bad airplane seats on www.seatguru.com.
In short, people are more informed about making decisions than ever. But they are not tied to the computer. With cell phones that have Internet access, the information is going mobile. Guests waiting to check out of a hotel post online hotel reviews. Some cell phone technology offers mobile maps and directions.
Coded messsages
So-called "smart codes" are beginning to play an increasingly important role in the information quest. Codes access information instantly on a cell phone screen. Eventually "Upcodes" will be attached, stuck, glued or printed on objects and, with a cell phone photo, they will link the consumer to an appropriate Internet page or retail stores.
In some countries, code photos can supply information about a house for sale while you're sitting in front of it. And photos of codes on a garment will call up comparable prices in several stores. In grocery stores, cell phone photos of codes will give you product ingredients.