I am participating in the ComLuv/Famous Blogger blogging contest. While all the posts, including mine, are on how to encourage comments on blog posts, other topics flow from that. I got into a discussion with Mark from Clickbank about the interactive nature of blogs, as opposed to the didactic nature of magazine articles. This led to the predictable question: If everyone is just having a conversation, how do you tell the difference between the person pretending to know what they are talking about and the ones who do? This is especially problematic when you know nothing about the topic and are trying to learn. Mark maintains that you can tell after conversing for a while if someone knows what they are talking about. I have a couple of problems with that. The first is that I do not have time to converse for a while when I am researching something. I need the information now. Second, con artists can b.s. their way into a White House reception past the Secret Service. How am I supposed to judge over the internet if someone is just a smooth talker or is an expert? Of course, if I speak perfectly good Texan and they speak broken Queen’s English, I may dismiss them when they really are experts because of my inability to understand what they are telling me.
What we need is a system where the people who have time to converse can tell the people who do not who the good guys are and who the con artists are. That is what Scribnia does. It is a blogging community that allows users to rate websites. Then when you or I need information, we can use that rating to tell how reliable a given website is in delivering useful, accurate information. You can see that I have one of the Scribnia widgets on the right hand sidebar of this blog. Unfortunately, no one has taken me up on it and rated the blog, so I cannot tell you how accurate the ratings are. That may be the Achille’s heel of the system, that blogs that are good are unrated, as are many that are bad. Market research says usually only a few people out of all users bother with ratings systems, and those few are usually angry at the time. That tends to leave a negative bias in the ratings.
I am not sure what the answer to identifying true experts in a global, faceless society is. Mostly, I think we will figure it out as we go along, much the same as humans always have. By the way, if you would go by FamousBloggers.com and leave a nice juicy comment on my post, I would appreciate it. One liners don’t count, so you are actually going to have to read the article and ask a real question. Or you could rate my blog at Scribnia. Think of it as contributing to the blogging community we have become.
