Slashdot Mirror
Berners-Lee Wants Truth Ratings For Websites
holy_calamity writes "While introducing the new World Wide Web Foundation Tim Berners-Lee made also asked for a system of ratings to help people distinguish truth and untruth online. 'On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly,' he said, saying that 'there needed to be new systems that would give websites a label for trustworthiness once they had been proved reliable sources.'"
PageRank is a popularity contest, not a truth gauge.
Otherwise how do you explain The Onion as the first result for "onion"
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The original article was on the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7613201.stm
It should be emphasised that he isn't suggesting a "truth commission" that would tag all web pages.
He specifically said that he'd be interested to see how different organisations would label websites, depending on their intended use.
In many ways this is just a specific use of the semantic web concept that Berners-Lee and others have been trying to bring about for the last few years.
Truthiness is a creation of Steven Colbert of the Colbert Report, and was Merriam-Webster's 2006 word of the year
Right before the Web Bubble popped in 1999, there was a company called ThirdVoice that was rising to the surface. It was a browser plugin that made a layer of "post-it notes" that were attached to specific pages shown in the browser, even tagging specific items on the page. Anyone with the plugin was letting their browser hit the ThirdVoice server, which contained a list of notes indexed to the page, with pointers to which item was notated. So viewers could switch on and off the layer, and see how anyone else had marked up the page. That let people give ratings to pages, and people could look at them, make up their minds, and post their own take on things. There was also a feature to add or remove specific users or user groups to what was displayed, to cut out spam.
That kind of independent rating and commentary, right there on the page, is what should satisfy Berners-Lee. He should just dig up the old ThirdVoice app, or this Slashdot post, and pay a few dozen thousand bucks at a team to dust it off. If he wanted to do it right, he'd sponsor the startup of two or three independent teams which would then compete with each other, for true independence. We don't need some "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval To Rule Them All" imposing a front layer from a single powerful org that controls the whole Web with its opinion of what lies beneath.
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make install -not war
Yeah, but I'm waiting for that website to get a -1 Troll for adding words I don't use to its dictionary, thus legitimizing people who aren't just like me to make the world a place where I am not perceived as superior to them.
I often use language as a means to reaffirm my biases, and I am too good for people who express the concept of "salutations" in a different way than me. Should "wassup" find itself in the dictionary, how will we know who to look down for superficial reasons? I won't even touch upon the reasons for making the distinction in one's personal life, because if you don't share my personal bias you are an ignorant slob, and I'm better than you.
Note: Try reading the introduction to a dictionary, where they explain their methods and purpose. You'll find that they are not written to address the purpose you are trying to burden them with. So you are using the wrong tool for the job. If you need help, you can start here. Read especially the last section. (Their procedure is typical of a dictionary).