Submitted by charles h (not verified) on October 16, 2005 - 1:44pm.
Kyle: Thanks for your thoughtful reply stating your intentions. Please don't take anything I said as a personal rebuke -- on the web one tends to forget that there is a person behind every page (except for those SEO-type pages, perhaps).
I think that I'm in total agreement with you about the nature of information on the web and the instant "authority" that web pages created -- an authority which people are only too credulous about. I'm a librarian by training and a large part of the challenge librarians face in the internet age is source validation - separating trusted information from that which is not to be trusted.
What I take issue with is precisely the issue of self-disclosure, however. You say that you intentions are out in the open because you gave an interview in a large newspaper. I take issue with that. I had to google around to find that interview -- forgive me if I missed a link on the site -- and I don't think you can count on the average user to do that. Perhaps I should have surmised from the URL and the wacky nature of some of the facts that it was not meant to be taken seriously, or that it was too good to be true. But I didn't. Partly because of my own desire to believe it and get some good referencable material for my blog or conversation or whatever, but also because there was nothing on the site to indicate that it wasn't true. Would it be so bad, for example, to have an "about" page that says "everything on gullible.info is made up"?
We are a credulous people in general and the education system -- not to mention advertising -- is certainly to blame for that. My fear is that you are actually undercutting the very point you are trying to make -- that there's a lot of bogus information out there, published bypeoplpe with malicious intentions -- by deliberately blurring the line between true and false.
Reply
Kyle: Thanks for your thoughtful reply stating your intentions. Please don't take anything I said as a personal rebuke -- on the web one tends to forget that there is a person behind every page (except for those SEO-type pages, perhaps).
I think that I'm in total agreement with you about the nature of information on the web and the instant "authority" that web pages created -- an authority which people are only too credulous about. I'm a librarian by training and a large part of the challenge librarians face in the internet age is source validation - separating trusted information from that which is not to be trusted.
What I take issue with is precisely the issue of self-disclosure, however. You say that you intentions are out in the open because you gave an interview in a large newspaper. I take issue with that. I had to google around to find that interview -- forgive me if I missed a link on the site -- and I don't think you can count on the average user to do that. Perhaps I should have surmised from the URL and the wacky nature of some of the facts that it was not meant to be taken seriously, or that it was too good to be true. But I didn't. Partly because of my own desire to believe it and get some good referencable material for my blog or conversation or whatever, but also because there was nothing on the site to indicate that it wasn't true. Would it be so bad, for example, to have an "about" page that says "everything on gullible.info is made up"?
We are a credulous people in general and the education system -- not to mention advertising -- is certainly to blame for that. My fear is that you are actually undercutting the very point you are trying to make -- that there's a lot of bogus information out there, published bypeoplpe with malicious intentions -- by deliberately blurring the line between true and false.
Best wishes, Charles H.