Trust the bloggers? Who can you believe online?

Citizen Spin: "Dan Gilmor, in his book 'We the Media. Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People', asks whose information you can trust online? He concludes there is a lack of framework for establishing the veracity of information and the credibility of the author. He calls for: "A reliable reputation system world allow us to verity people and judge the veracity of the things they say based, in part, on what people we trust say about them."

There are already some systems in place for checking the reputation of individuals within online communities - look at the way eBay operates its ratings system. Would this be appropriate for sources of information online, or corporate web sites?" 

Comments

[Cameron Riley]

Blog software such as blogger, typepad etc are a step backward from the lessons learnt from usenet. The email newsgroups lacked wide moderation, and often relied on one person to deem what was suitable or not. In high volume newsgroups this was not possible.

Community sites such as Slashdot and kuro5hin appeared with user moderation as well as editors. One of the reasons I chose scoop for South Sea Republic was because it enabled users to rate each others' comments (and articles). With scoop, any user can send an article to a moderation queue where other users will rate it to determine if it gets published or not.

But by the same token, the blog style and community style, and even unmoderated publishing all have their place. Some scale better than others though.