According the Guardian, Tim Berners-Lee (via the Guardian) worries that bloggers may be bad for the internet.

(Update: Here’s a link to Tim’s actual blog where he states that the Guardian article was overly negative.)

Quote:

“…he warns that ‘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.”

Endquote.

Eventually, we may end up in a situation as we’re currently in with phishing sites, where it’s unfortunately mostly up to the user to look at a blog critically and decide whether to trust it. So here are some things raise red flags when checking out a new blog for the first time:

1. The blog’s “content” consists of a few paragraphs and is of dubious quality, with no clear author’s voice, and at worst, copied from elsewhere or generated by a robot.

2. The blog’s “content” consists mostly of links and bookmarking bars, making me think the blogger is more concerned with popularity than credibility or useful information.

3. The blog is covered with ads, so many that the content is obscured: leading me to feel that the blog is more concerned with money than credibility or useful information.

4. The blog has no attribution, about page, or disclosure.

5. The blog has comments and trackbacks disabled.

6. The blog only has comments and trackbacks that paint it in a positive light.

I’m not going to link to any questionable blog examples, but I can tell you where to find some.

1. Go to digg. Click on the comments for any story. Click on “Who Dugg or Blogged This?”. Check out some of the people who blogged the dugg story. Many of these blogs are of a questionable nature: just lists of other dugg stories.

2. Go to Technorati. Search for money making keywords like “adsense” or “mortgages”. You’ll find some goofy blogs.

Of course, my suggested criteria only takes care of the most obviously misleading sites. What about Tim’s bigger worry, which is a blog that looks totally legitimate, with real content and comments, but is only concerned with a skewed agenda under the guise of objectivity or open debate? Maybe they have gathered an audience that is supportive of their cause and has a lot of comments and inbound links that lend credence to their misinformation, but behind the scenes they cull critical comments and link only to other blogs or sites supporting their cause (I’m thinking of some political sites).

I don’t really know how to avoid this situation. It occurs in the real world, so maybe some answers can be found there: the equivalent of an internet “Better Business Bureau”, web “ghettos” that people just avoid, or search engine / browser functionality that indicates a questionable site (this is starting to happen with phishing sites).

Or maybe human editors will be prove to be necessary after all, for fact checking and restoring credibility. These editors might be human (at “old world” media companies) or Web 2.0 websites with their pool of rank-happy users.

But utimately, people will always be motivated by easy money (infomercials) or tend to congregate around media that supports their world view (talk radio, Fox News) so it’s no surprise to see this happening on the internet. Maybe we should just admit there will never be utopia of free, credible information in any medium, and move on.

Lastly, here are some thoughts from broadstuff.

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