Web under threat from Bloggers

Tim Berners-Lee is reported in the Guardian as believing the Web is under threat of being overwhelmed by fraudsters, cheats, spammers et al - and bloggers are potentially part of the problem. To quote the Guardian article:

"there is a great danger that it becomes a place where untruths start to spread more than truths, or it becomes a place which becomes increasingly unfair in some way". He singles out the rise of blogging as one of the most difficult areas for the continuing development of the web, because of the risks associated with inaccurate, defamatory and uncheckable information.

I certainly take the fraudsters and cheats seriously, and not all of them are "evil" - the venality of some small web companies continues to astound me. But it is worth looking at bloggers, as we by and large regard ourselves as "good guys", in more light. Sir Tim's criticism of blogging is essentially that:

"The blogging world works by people reading blogs and linking to them. You're taking suggestions of what you read from people you trust.

Now, even the most cursory search will find hundreds of racist/fascist/fundamentalist and other -ist blogs, but I don't think thats the real issue - the nutters will be with us always, and we know where they are coming from. I think the main issue is inaccurate information masquerading as truth.

There is actually an interesting brouhaha going on right now about TechCrunch, one of the main US tech blogsites - in essence the site is used to showcase (or puff piece, as its critics would have it) new Web 2.0 companies, but there are accusations that as the TechCrunch head, Michael Arrington, is financially (and/or otherwise) associated with some of the companies being covered and does not always disclose this, then he has conflicts of interests and is not acting within the standards of true journalism. He of course refutes this, claiming blogging is different and must be held to different standards. To quote some of this post:

TechCrunch is a new kind of publication. We don’t fit into a neat little box like traditional media, who refrain from financial conflicts of interest with their readers and feel that they are therefore above reproach. They aren’t, but they really, really feel that they are, and look down on blogs and other media as the unwashed masses. Yes, I’m grouping them unfairly, but the really good reporters will all soon be on their own anyway, so this will be completely true eventually.

TechCrunch is different. TechCrunch is all about insider information and conflicts of interest. The only way I get access to the information I do is because these entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are my friends. I genuinely like these people and want them to succeed, and they know it and therefore trust me more than they trust traditional press.

I am an active investor, board member and advisory board member with a number of startups. That isn’t going to change. I also write about startups. That isn’t going to change, either. Obviously people like what we write on TechCrunch or they wouldn’t come back. But no one should think TechCrunch is objective or conflict-free. We aren’t. We never have been. We never will be.

All I promise is to give my honest opinion every time I write, regardless of whether there is a conflict of interest or not.

So, a Blog is explicitly NOT an organ of truth and veracity, but of honest opinion. He ends with:

I don’t know what else to say - none of this is going to change. Some people seem to think that I either need to shut down TechCrunch, or stop investing. Here’s my answer: No.

In other words, caveat reader. Its my blogsite and I'll do what I want to.

You gets what you pays for (its free....).

Of course, many people take issue with this view, for example Canadian blogger Matthew Ingram. who essentially argues that good journalistic practice needs to exist in the major blogs.

Hmmm.....stones and glass houses? To quote Wikipedia:

In the yellow journalism era of the 19th century, many newspapers in the United States relied on sensational stories that were meant to anger or excite the public, rather than to inform. The more restrained style of reporting that relies on fact checking and accuracy regained popularity around World War II.

Criticism of journalism is varied and sometimes vehement. Credibility is questioned because of anonymous sources; errors in facts, spelling, and grammar; real or perceived bias; and scandals involving plagiarism and fabrication.

In the past, newspapers have often been owned by so-called press barons, and were used either as a rich man’s toy, or a political tool. More recently in the United States, a greater number of newspapers (and all of the largest ones) are being run by large media corporations such as Gannett (the largest in the United States), The McClatchy Company, Cox, LandMark, Morris Corp., The Tribune Company, etc. Many industry watchers have concerns that the growing need for profit growth natural to corporations will have a negative impact on the overall quality of journalism.

One interpretation of this is that Blogs are starting out as a new form of news and will go through the same evolution to become revered, trusted and worthy journals. Another is that News media were ever biased, but at least with Blogs its only the writer's bias you have to account for.

Nonetheless, Mr Ingram has a point - as he puts it:

What journalists and bloggers should strive for if they want to be taken seriously is fairness, balance and honesty. All else is secondary. As my friend Scott Karp said recently, trust is the only asset we have.

But (I hear you ask) why can't Web 2.0 solve all this via its social networks, by some form of "wisdom of the crowds" rating of the trustworthiness of blogsites, something like the way eBay rates its participants.

Under such a rating system, TechCrunch should probably be re-rated from "harmless" to "mostly harmless"

And, for example the scurrilous reporting in 1997 by online 'Zine The Onion about Clinton's foreign policy towards the Byzantine Empire would have been held up for the cradle of lies it is.

Unfortunately it would seem (surprise surprise) that the Wisdom of Crowds is often hijacked by the Vocal Minority, as apparently has happened to blog story-rating darling Digg - apparently a Dogg of a site these days as its allegedly heavily gamed. This has forced Digg to stomp on those who Dugg it most and were ensuring the majority stayed silent. This is not restricted to Digg, there is disquiet as well about Netscape, Reddit et al being driven by special interest groups rather than the democratic masses.

So, what to do when people rigg the blogg system?

To quote Sir Tim again:

....the technology must help us express much more complicated feelings about who we'll trust with what."

The next generation of the internet needs to be able to reassure users that they can establish the original source of the information they digest.

Its that Trust thing again.

Some chat sites already allow user rating of the users as well as their postings, but clearly there is another iteration of blog believability required.

Postscript - Liz Gannes posted a semi related story on the re-rise of the old pyramid netscheme AllAdvantage, an (in)famous Web 1.0 "Social Network". Sir Tim is looking to be right on the button - does Web 2.0 + Money = Scam?

Post - Potscript

Sir Tim commented in his own blog about the Guardian article I linked to above. It makes his thinking clearer:

People have, since it started, complained about the fact that there is junk on the web. And as a universal medium, of course, it is important that the web itself doesn't try to decide what is publishable. The way quality works on the web is through links.

It works because reputable writers make links to things they consider reputable sources. So readers, when they find something distasteful or unreliable, don't just hit the back button once, they hit it twice. They remember not to follow links again through the page which took them there. One's chosen starting page, and a nurtured set of bookmarks, are the entrance points, then, to a selected subweb of information which one is generally inclined to trust and find valuable.

A great example of course is the blogging world. Blogs provide a gently evolving network of pointers of interest. As do FOAF files. I've always thought that FOAF could be extended to provide a trust infrastructure for (e..g.) spam filtering and OpenID-style single sign-on and its good to see things happening in that space.

So its that Trust thing again, but with an interesting comment on reputation, which goes back to the earlier TechCrunch vs Matthew Ingram discussion. To me though, the point made above about having to have a whole set of bookmarks and a subweb to get news I trust, rather than having it easily aggregated in say The Guardian, is a concern. Most people do Convenient, so it seems to me there is another layer of blog evolution still to go.

And as to FOAF, anything that can stop blogspam is very welcome...