Information and validity

Information and validity

We are now living in the new age of media where information flows faster than anything on the internet. With the new speed and amount of information flow, people can easily get access to new information on the internet simply by clicking into the search engine.

Blogs came out more than 10 years ago. It became more and more popular since the late 90s last century and became the mainstream web 2.0 tools for people to express their own ideas and exchange opinions by leaving comments under the blog entry. Founder of O'Reilly Media, Tim O'Reilly, even draft a ‘Blogger's Code of Conduct’ for bloggers to enforce civility on their blogs by being civil themselves and moderating comments on their blog in 2007 due to the threats made to blogger Kathy Sierra, including death threats.

1.    We take responsibility for our own words and for the comments we allow on our blog.

2.    We won't say anything online that we wouldn't say in person

3.    We connect privately before we respond publicly

4.    When we believe someone is unfairly attacking another, we take action

5.    We do not allow anonymous comments

6.    We ignore the trolls

However, as the speed of information flow increase, blogging became less popular, no that there are no bloggers anymore, but many of then turn to faster and shorter ways of information, such as twitter and weibo. Blogs became a supplementary to the 140-words micro-blogs.

 

                                 twitter                                        weibo

Hubpages is another thing. The similarities between blogs and hugpages are that both are post published by individuals and allow a comment sections for opinions exchange under the management of the hubber. However, Hubpages is not a blog. A magazine-style articles, which are longer than blog post and covering a specific subject in depth is being adapted. Hubbers do not have to spend time to manage their articles like blogs, all the articles are being tagged and sorted out by hubpages itself.

http://hubimg.com/v/site/homepage_v03.mp4

Despite the different structures of blogs and hubpages, the same constraint lies in them. Even though the Bloggers’ Code of Conduct is being promoted, with the virtual identity on the internet, it is almost impossible for people, bloggers in particular to control the comments people gave. All they can do is to delete the comment and black list the person, but no one can control the comments they post elsewhere.

Also, the validity of the published posts is not controlled. There is no one such as ‘internet police’ to manage the quality of the posts as the number of posts and articles on the internet is unmanageable.

The problem exists not only in blogs and hubpages. Wikipedia, known as the free encyclopedia, did nothing to ensure the validity of their pages. As anyone with an account is allowed to post and edit a page, the information on Wikipedia is not trustworthy. Ironically, Wikipedia always comes first in the search engines whenever names of celebrities, politicians, objects, terms, anything that Wikipedia contains was typed into the search engine. This gave users an illusion that the resources from Wikipedia are all true.

Hence, what we should do on the internet is to behave and think. The virtual identity is not that virtual, people can’t stay hidden forever; information cannot be blindly absorbed.