hierarchy of trust
Hierarchy of Trust - Dan Gillmor bemoans the fact that the Internet has lots of anonymous people who spread misinformation. But maybe he is judging too harshly, though. For example, I have suspected Dan of spreading misinformation at times, and I do not blame the Internet or even him for that. The more people we communicate with, the more we have to be fuzzy about how much we are willing to trust. This is no different than being in a library and overhearing someone tell his friend about “this great investment opportunity”. The Internet simply lets us communicate with more people, so we have more trust decisions to make. But by the same token, the Internet makes it more difficult for us to have deep communications with everyone we meet, and online relationships tend to be more transient. In fact, as our lives increasingly are besieged by interruptions to our time, hundreds of e-mails a day, instant messages, and so on — we automatically erect attentional barriers that greatly reduce the impact these communications. At the same time, the base of opinions for those willing to seek conflicting information (as opposed to hanging out in online communities that amplify their own biases) is much greater. Dan makes a point about sites that allow comments to be posted, but ironically fails to include a link to allow readers to post comments to his article. Clearly, sites that allow dissenting opinions to be posted will be somewhat more trustworthy, but like any community, an open mike can serve to amplify the biases of that community as well. On the Internet, as in life, the only way to trust anything is to take personal responsibility for seeking out the most compelling conflicting views that you can find. And even then, keep it fuzzy. In the paper, “Making a Semantic Web,” I talk about some ways that people can universally add commentary or trust recommendations to other people’s published works. It is quite easy to imagine how you could use a generic data-mining “clustering” algorithm to have the system intelligently show you only opinions from those people who had similar views to yours. Even more interesting, however, would be to periodically have the system show you the world through the eyes of the people who were clustered very differently from you. Why doesn’t someone do this? Interestingly, Novell’s former CEO is taking over CEO position at Google, so maybe something will happen there. Novell understood metadata (at least, Craig Burton did), and Google is currently the dominant metadata supplier. And despite the fact that Sergey Brin and Larry Page seem to be fairly anti-Microsoft, they are not stupid, and I would love to see them succeed at expanding the uses of metadata on the Internet (somebody needs to do it, and I am too busy).