Beware the bloggers of the World Wide Web

Its inventor worries about its malevolent future:

The creator of the world wide web told the Guardian last night that the internet is in danger of being corrupted by fraudsters, liars and cheats. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Briton who founded the web in the early 1990s, says that if the internet is left to develop unchecked, "bad phenomena" will erode its usefulness...

But he warns that "there is a great danger that it becomes a place where untruths start to spread more than truths, or it becomes a place which becomes increasingly unfair in some way". He singles out the rise of blogging as one of the most difficult areas for the continuing development of the web, because of the risks associated with inaccurate, defamatory and uncheckable information.

Sir Tim believes devotees of blogging sites take too much information on trust: "The blogging world works by people reading blogs and linking to them. You're taking suggestions of what you read from people you trust..." The next generation of the internet needs to be able to reassure users that they can establish the original source of the information they digest...

But, hell, you can't trust much of the major media--and I try to give sources.

Mark C.

Posted by markc at November 3, 2006 03:30 PM