It's recently been pointed out to me by a faithful reader that I have been quite the delinquent when it comes to posting to the blog....I couldn't agree more with this assessment. In an attempt to fan a buzz that will bring me back to write more (I mean, really, will people want to come to the site if even I wont?) I have written a post.
At any rate, I'd like to point everyone to a really interesting post over at Bokardo by Joshua Porter. He links to an article by Tim Berners-Lee and quotes the following from him:
“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.”
Porter then writes:
...walk down Main Street, USA, and listen in on conversations what you hear is more like Wikipedia or Digg or Google than it is the Encyclopedia Brittanica, the Associated Press, or a Librarian. These tools are the people’s tools, because they are built on the relationships of millions of people, not the expertise of a few. Most people aren’t experts, and most people don’t need no stinkin’ experts.
There is something great in thinking that on the Web we are free to pursue our own reputation. If we write well, help others, continue learning, and link to valuable resources we can carve out a niche where there was none. Is this an egalitarian pipe-dream? I don’t know. Perhaps it is, perhaps not.
This is the reason that the blogosphere is self correcting. People want to be experts, and bloggers who are not credible are outed by the rest of the community. We have the responsibility and privelege, as publishers and consumers of content, to determine what we put out there and what we take in.
It's all out in the ether. And it's all up for grabs.
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