[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Aggregated content, fact checking, PICS, Atom/RSS (was Rig
To consider sources, you are right. I am aware of the disparity between US and European or Asia-Pacific coverage. That is a benefit of the web: easy access to multiple sources. What isn't provided is independent validation beyond one's own good judgment. Consider the technology. In the thread that kicked this off, the cited source was attempting to refer to the technology of aggregation as a source of fabrication. In essence, aggregators can be fooled. Does anyone here dispute that? (No, I didn't ask if there are conspiracies afoot, black helicopters, etc., just if the aggregators can be fooled?) Of course they can. NSS. The general rule is don't put anything on the web you don't want to see on the front page of the New York Times and don't believe anything you read on the web until you have had it validated by multiple independent sources using multiple independent means. Possibly true of the Times too given a bad day in the editor's chair but less likely. At this time in the US, many states are considering legislation for the dataMegaMarts that use aggregators. We know by observation such legislation is often flawed because it is passed without expert understanding of the technology. While we may dispute other aspects of some topic, it is possible to provide expertise about the technology as it exists, as it is used, and as it is deployed. Otherwise, policy prevails. There are policies such as CFR 28 Part 23 for systems used to gather information on individuals in the process of a criminal investigation that do govern the accuracy and conditions under which such information can be gathered. Systems designed and provided to agencies charged with these activities must certify the compliance of their systems to this CFR. What isn't determined is if information purchased by agencies from the dataMegaMarts is subject to the CFR. Likely not. Information from these systems cannot be mixed into the CFR-compliant systems. The fair assessment is that such CFR-compliant systems must be the gateways or clients of the non-compliant systems. How to do this is the issue at hand. len From: Ronald Bourret [mailto:rpbourret@r...] Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2005 3:01 AM 1) If there are 8 billion Web pages, there is no way anyone can rate even a meaningful subset of them by hand. Google's voting system, while imperfect, strikes me as a pretty good way to do this automatically. 2) The problem with any system of "experts" is deciding who the experts are. Main-stream journalism may at least be fact-checked, but it's not clear the world will ever agree that those writing about a particular topic are indeed "experts" to anyone beside their peers. If you don't believe this, read US and European articles about the same topic and see if you think they're even covering the same event. 3) The Web is a like a great, big bar with a zillion drunken conversations. You'll meet some interesting people, discover some dubious facts, and have a good time, but anyone who trusts it implicitly is asking for trouble, and all the ratings in the world are never going to convince the black helicopter crowd [1] that the UN isn't really invading the US.
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