Re: [syndication] The medium and the message

[Aaron Swartz <aswartz@swartzfam.com>]

Leigh Dodds <ldodds@ingenta.com> wrote:

> <paranoia>Please don't take my comments as knocking my.info, its a
> very nice site :)</paranoia>

Of course not, and I apologize for continually tooting my own horn. It's
just that this is at the forefront of my attention currently, and so it
keeps coming out in discussion. Sorry about that, I'll try and stop. Anyway,
I prefer criticism to silence.

> At the moment all providers are 'trusted' i.e. of equal worth. What's
> needed is a way to assign a 'trustworthiness' to particular information
> sources. Who is reliable? Who do others consider to be reliable?, Who
> is a first hand source and who is merely repeating information?

Right, this is why I found the discussion about adding something to RSS that
signified second-hand sources and repeated information very useful. For
example, I take the information of several sites (Salon, Web Reference,
etc.) at a relatively low level of worthiness. Then, when a specific article
is mentioned on a site like Scripting News or Tomalak's Realm, its
worthiness/importance is increased. However, there's currently no way to
really express this with RSS.

> Its the natural next step to news and content syndication I believe.
> Everyone now has a printing press of their very own, so how do
> you assign value, worth, reliability, etc?

Right, there are so many bloggers out there doing so much work, it seems a
shame to waste it. If we truly are dealing with an "information glut" as
everyone seems to say, I'd think that bloggers are the way to get out of it.
We have a distributed community of people, all across the Web, reading
through news stories and other information for us and sorting out the good
from the bad.

The next step is to leverage this, not just for news, but for sites in
general. This is where concepts of reputation managers come in. Bloggers can
tell me not only what's good content today, but what's good content on a
particular subject, or search. Much as Jorn has done for James Joyce:

http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/portal.html

Google is trying to capitalize on this kind of thing with PageRank, but
right now it's a rather flawed system, because there's no way to say who you
trust. I've often found that with Google, the top results are archives of
email lists, because they always have links that point to each other (next
message, in reply to, etc.).

The idea I came up with this morning was Bloggle: Google for Blogs, (domain
already taken, however). I think there might be some potential here, using
Bloggers as guides to sources of information. This also ties in with
(sorry!) my site, The Info Network:

http://www.theinfo.org

where anyone can jump in and start up a page for any subject, using it to
point to good URLs on the subject, or write about the subject themselves.
Then, anyone else can jump in and add to or modify the work. However, I
haven't had a lot in the way of traffic, so there's not much there.

> This is probably straying way off topic for this list, so I'll cease and
> desist at this point and resume lurking.

Perhaps, but I think it's an interesting discussion. Does anyone know of a
better place?

-- 
        Aaron Swartz         |"This information is top security.
<http://swartzfam.com/aaron/>|     When you have read it, destroy yourself."
  <http://www.theinfo.org/>  |             - Marshall McLuhan