Re: [xml-dev] Aggregated content, fact checking, PICS, Atom/RSS (was Rigged Aggregators)

[Bob Foster <bob@objfac.com>]

What people actually read isn't a good indicator of accuracy and 
quality, so you want to provide a way for people to vote on accuracy and 
quality? People's Choice Awards for the web? Don't you think it's likely 
that people will vote in favor of the things they actually read?

Or maybe you think there's a chance the literate, critical few can stuff 
the ballot box? Think again.

The web is a real democracy, unfiltered by layers of delegates, 
senators, members of parliament and snotty librarians. The audience 
prefers bread and circuses. Any sort of polling scheme will reflect that.

Bob Foster

Ken North wrote:
 >>>No matter how you model it, the very biggest thing would be to have 
a way
 >>>for people to very easily add to meta data about how accurate a given
 >>>article is because relying on the publisher of the article to do 
this for
 >>>you has obvious flaws.
 >>>[snip]
 >>>But to my mind the usability and convenience of the
 >>>mechanism by which "accuracy" meta data gets created and reviewed by an
 >>>active audience is far more critical.
 >
 >
 > Michael Gorman, President of the American Library Association, 
recently wrote a
 > Los Angeles Times op-ed piece about digitizing books for Google:
 >
 > "Hailed as the ultimate example of information retrieval, Google is, 
in fact,
 > the device that gives you thousands of "hits" (which may or may not 
be relevant)
 > in no very useful order. Those characteristics are ignored and 
excused by those
 > who think that Google is the creation of "God's mind," because it 
gives the
 > searcher its heaps of irrelevance in nanoseconds. Speed is of the 
essence to the
 > Google boosters, just as it is to consumers of fast "food," but, as 
with fast
 > food, rubbish is rubbish, no matter how speedily it is delivered."
 >
 > In a followup piece, he also commented about the quality and
 > accuracy of blogs:
 > "A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of 
which the
 > unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can 
communicate
 > their thoughts via the web."
 >
 > Attention.XML, del.icio.us, XFN, and menow are interesting, but 
"who's reading
 > what" isn't really a measure of accuracy and quality.
 >
 > Media organizations, although imperfect, have staff people to do fact 
checking.
 > Academic papers are often peer reviewed.
 > We know there's a difference in the credibility of those sources 
versus blogs
 > and fringe web sites. So we need a solution for filtering out the junk.
 >
 > Search engines, aggregators and semantic web technologies would 
benefit by
 > having some type of qualifiers for expressing accuracy and quality.
 >
 > "Was this article useful?" appears on many web articles. Perhaps we 
need to
 > identifying fact-checked articles and start carrying quality rating 
information
 > in RSS and Atom feeds. An RSS channel can carry a PICS rating, but we 
need that
 > information on a per link basis, not per channel.
 >
 > Chris Armstrong wrote an interesting paper about PICS as a quality 
filter and a
 > proposal by labeling the quality of information sources:
 > http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue9/pics/
 >
 > CIQM developed a labeling system for bibliographic databases that 
included best
 > practices or QA policies such as using a second indexer, using 
authority files
 > for name validation, and so on:
 > http://www.i-a-l.co.uk/db_Qual/label.gif
 >
 > With 8 billion web pages indexed by Google and 5.8 million feeds 
indexed by
 > Feedster, a quality rating system is looking more attractive every day.