Really?

At Bloggercon, Jay Rosen made a point that stuck with me. He thought it would be interesting to study the process by which bloggers learn how to attain the same level of credibility as writers contributing to established publications. It’s occurring to me now that it would also be interesting, as a reader of blogs, to be able to quickly establish where people are in that process.

It seems like a well commented blog is one good indication that the author can be given at least some trust. As we know, there is a breed of fact checking comment-leavers who thrive on describing the various ways that the author made a jack-ass out of himself in his posts. If I’m reading a completely uncommented blog (like mine) then I’m much less likely to take any information I read there as true without doing some back-up research. If there are contrary opinions and challenges of the facts all over someone’s blog, I’m more comfortable because it feels like if there were inaccuracies or overstatements in a post, someone would have pointed it out. That doesn’t mean I take the view of the person commenting as true either, but I feel like I can triangulate an accurate position from the discussion that takes place.

I have no idea what this means, and this is exactly why I called my blog “Half Baked.” It does seem like it might have some potential as material for my talk at Internet Librarian, however.

Comments

[Spike Washburn]

Even a blog without comments can have credibility if the posted commentary also cites some background research that supports the arguments being made. Just like authoring any good term paper, you can't make a proper argument without providing supporting factual evidence. Its a lot easier to make arguments with subjective statements, so a lot of blog commentary is based on subjective statements rather than factual. ironicAND I THINK THAT SUCKS!/ironic

[Sebastian Gard]

Yeah, I'm not saying its the only way to gain credibility, I'm just saying that its one way for a reader to sniff out credibility without doing a lot of extra work checking the cited sources in the post. The next step in all this is figuring out efficient ways to determine the reliability of the blogger's sources.

[Sebastian Gard]

I just found a perfect example of what I mean here. This post and the comments on it take place in an topic area I know nothing about and involves people I've never heard of. The volume and diversity of comments, though, made me fee like it was worth spending time reading it without having to take the time to figure out where the author was coming from.

I'm not saying that my approach is a good one, I'm just trying to describe how I deal with information in blogs.

[AJ]

hey Sebastian,

It is an interesting question and there are a couple other ways of quickly measuring 'credibility':

a) technorati: do a search based on the person's blog (ie: punch in their url)... see how many people have linked to this person, glance at those people's blogs. Sort by authority.. has this person been linked to by someone that you respect?

b) google pagerank: Check the pagerank of the blog.. if the blog has a high pagerank (6, 7, 8..), you can be sure that at least google thinks the person is credible (and of course this works for the same reason that technorati works: inbound links)

c) bloglines: create a bloglines account... subscribe to the blog in question. How many subscribers does this person have? 2? 200? 2000? The subscriber number can give you a quick read on how 'credible' this person is (or at least how interesting to read).

hth,

AJ

[meeero]

a high pagerank doesn't mean that the site is good too...