Yes, Paul Carr of TechCrunch is right in many ways… the real time web, and people powering it, can’t really handle the truth. I’ve said in the past too. The real time web is not going to last as a viable source of data and truth. To make it reliable it’s going to be far less real time. Getting to the facts takes time, resources and sometimes vast amounts of thought (by a computer or a human).
What’s troubling though is that there’s a ton more misinformation pain to go through before users and/or companies figure out what to do with all this mass real time web publishing. This Ft. Hood twitter stuff is pretty bad. The celebrity death rumors are horrible. how much worse does it have to get before our values catch up? or maybe it’s ok? maybe deciphering real from fake information is best left up to the end user? it’s better than less info?
Russell,
You are right. It takes someone a lot of time, fact checking, and production to put out what is actually the “news”, and not a bunch of noisy people talking their heads off.
That’s why sooner or later, people will pay just a little bit for information they can trust. They will realize it in different areas of interest that matter the most to them, but chances are, we already cover it…politics, entertainment, local news, sports, business, etc.
That’s when people will stop saying I’m crazy about putting walls up to block the aggregators that have made the internet much of what it is today (for the good, and the bad).
New stuff always starts out whimsical, full of creativity, and is incredibly appealing.
Then they grow up, lose a little lustre, but gain added wisdom and respect for being more than “fun and games”.
I won’t be the only one to block Google with robot.txt red lights, but I hope to be a fly in the ointment that others in the news business will follow — for our industry and for the people seeking trustworthy news sources.
R. Murdoch
(ok – not Rupert Murdoch but someone stating his position on blocking Google from indexing his sites).
More on the issue at the NYTimes…http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/doing-the-math-on-news-corps-threatened-google-block/