Credibility Online

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Credibility Online

• Week 6 2 May 2006

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Tonights Overview

• Change story success!
• Question Compare technology used to submit Bios
  Week 4 and Change Story Week 5.
• Guest Lecture Barbara Warnick
• Credibility in the blogosphere
• Change assessment, feedback
• Explore Seattle (lab)

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Measuring Influence, Credibility

• Why?
• How?

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Blogosphere Influence Why?

• Information overload
• Growth as a form of public sphere
• Shapes the news hole
• Helps consumers make decisions
• Anything else?

5
Id add

• How do we insure that we arent creating a
  shallow citizenry
• A shallow citizenry can be turned into a
  dangerous mob more easily than an informed one.
  Dan Gillmor, We The Media

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Info Overload

• The inability to extract needed knowledge from a
  large quantity of information
• Exponential growth of the blogosphere -gt
• Technorati tracking
• 2 million blogs, March 2004
• 7.7 million blogs, March 2005
• 37.5 million blogs and 2.3 billion links, April
  2006

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A form of public sphere?

• Jürgen Habermas theory, adapted from Extending
  the Public Sphere Through Cyberspace The Case of
  Minnesota E-Democracy, First Monday
• Autonomy from state and economic power
• Participants exchange and critique
  moral-practical claims
• Sincerity discursive inclusion and equality
• Honest, active listening respectful
  communication
• Self-examination/reflection

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Shaping the News Hole

• Trent Lott story (2002)
• Covered by only one reporter following event
• Kept alive by bloggers - liberal and conservative
• Microsoft switch campaign (2002)
• LA Times (2004)
• Supreme Justices Scalia v Ginsburg
• Colberts monologue Saturday night?

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Assists decision-making (1/2)

• From Measuring Online Trust of WebsitesCredibilit
  y,Perceived Ease of Use and Risk
• Online trust is a function of
• Credibility, honesty, expertise, reputation
• Ease of use
• Risk
• Where honesty and expertise loaded together

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Assists decision-making (2/2)

• From Credibility Assessments of Online Health
  Information The Effect of Source Expertise and
  Knowledge of Content
• Unregulated environment increases risk
• Females more trusting than males
• Knowledge increases skepticism
• Source does matter (in this study)
• Some apparent if I read it, it must have a
  modicum of truth

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Why do we judge credibility?

• Is the expert the only credible source? I would
  argue that our trust in credentials gives the
  source the ability to decide what information is
  important rather than making the reader
  accountable for assessing the information.
  student, 2005
• If we are ever going to impact corporate media
  control, we need to change the idea that those
  sources are the only credible sources for
  information. How can we change the notion of
  credibility to include resources such as blogs?
  student, 2005

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Tools to Assess Credibility

• Why should we care what the numbers say?
• Readers need and want credible sources
• Do we want to return to the days of pamphleteers
  and soapboxes, snake oil salesmen and patent
  medicine (figuratively speaking)?

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Counting for Influence

• Academics count citations
• Counting treats all as equals
• Countered by weighting
• Comparisons are within field of study

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Measuring Blogosphere Influence

• Tools like Technorati
• Count inbound links
• Not all links created equal
• Tools like Blogpulse
• Count word clusters, links
• Show trends (rhetoric and sites)
• Truth Laid Bair
• Tools like Google, A9 (amazon rewards!)
• Human sites like Blogcritics, About.com, Open
  Source Directory

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When we count blogs

• We get a little consensus (A List)
• The long tail, documented
• A small set of bloggers account for the majority
  of traffic
• We know that power law distributions tend to
  arise in social systems where many people express
  their preferences among many options. We also
  know that as the number of options rise, the
  curve becomes more extreme.
• Power law distribution (see chart)

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Exercise part 1

• Log into Bryght take a few minutes to list the
  10 blogs (preferably, but websites accepted) that
  you could not live without
• Name - URL

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Exercise part 2

• This one well do on paper!
• While Im getting this ready we can start our
  review of the Change story

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First Individual Project

• Change text and image
• Create a new word document in it, note your
  thoughts (suggestions for improvements, kudos)
  about each students story.
• After youve reviewed everyones work revisit
  your own story. What would you do differently, if
  anything? What has this exercise affirmed?
• Send these to me as an e-mail attachment by end
  of day Wednesday, please. I will share comments
  (anonymously, of course).

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Resume Power Law Exercise

• Ive given a piece of paper to Andrea with her 10
  blogs. She will give this to the person on her
  left, who will look at the list and then generate
  his/her own new (public) list of 10. Pass to the
  left. Repeat/rinse.
• Well do this until everyone has a new list of 10
  sites.
• Then Ill compare the differences and report back
  next week.

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Why is this important?

• Because the sites you see are shaped, in part, by
  those who have already seen them.
• Thus, the business logic built into the tools is
  shaping your choices and helping to mold
  credibility
• Thus, transparency is key!

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Questions to Ponder

• Which link is the more representative of
  influence blogroll or post?
• Are several daily short posts more reflective of
  influence than less frequent longer (more depth)
  posts?
• How do we deconstruct the blogosphere to provide
  useful information about credibility within
  genres?
• Other?

22
Explore Seattle

• Next assignment coffee shop or Ballard story
  next week
• 10 days later, the last story
• Small groups work per course page

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Resources

• Gill, KE (2004). How can we measure the influence
  of the blogosphere. WWW2004, New York, NY USA.
  http//faculty.washington.edu/kegill/pub/www2004_b
  logosphere_gill.pdf
• Gill, KE (2005). Blogging, RSS and the
  information landscape, a look at online news.
  WWW2006, Chiba Japan. http//faculty.washington.ed
  u/kegill/pub/gill_www2005_rss.pdf