Web Biz

Distributed authorship has grown in the past year by leaps and bounds.  Such web sites allow people to control, modify, and create new content that is available to all.  This can vary from wikipedia, which allows anyone to modify the contents of the web site, to social networking and groupware web sites (such as MySpace), which allow particular users with access to control the content.  Either way, more and more users and people are contributing to the content and information that is so easily available on the world wide web. 

In a world where information is one click away, the responsibility to locate, measure, and effectively evaluate the information is burdened by the user, and yet, at the same time is being authored by the users of the web.

Recently, slashdot contained a link the article entitled "Death By Wikipedia" which commented on the abuse of wikipedia by partisan observing when the death of Ken Lay hit the news:

Here’s the dread fear with Wikipedia: It combines the global reach and authoritative bearing of an Internet encyclopedia with the worst elements of radicalized bloggers. You step into a blog, you know what you’re getting. But if you search an encyclopedia, it’s fair to expect something else.

The question then becomes, who and how do we determine which content is acceptable and provides value.  Furthermore, with the increase in information available, it has become more difficult to find quality information which can provide knowledge to the end users of the web.  And even more important, how does a user determine if the data, information, or knowledge is correct and unbiased?