Blog Credibility Ratings - The Web Credibility Movement

As the web grows and information disseminates all the more quickly, one must wonder how to believe anything that one reads out there. True, most popular blogs are right most of the time, but often times the source is lost. How can one track that?

Luckily the web has graced us with trackback links, to trace a post to it’s original owner. That and the ability of links in certain posts to state at the end of a news story where they received their information. Combined, this could prove to be a way of “verifying” where the original person found their news.

The news process would essentially be a simple tree, with the source node being at the very top of the tree. Depending on how many posts post about that original post, and so forth until the latest posts are counted, one could generate a relative “popularity.” One could also form a system of linking to the original article, which would be the most useful to the reader, and would lend the most credibility to a the original poster/page (say, in Google PageRank).

This will be the next challenge of the web–wikipedia is already tackling the problem in their own way. Eventually, the above system could weed out “the middle men,” and move towards less clicking, and happier users. This system should not be lumped with centralization of information–granted, any blog could be the original poster/news post, thus all blogs that are “useful” will benefit, as well as benefiting the users, and improving blog quality (automatically!).