If, and it’s a huge if, you can get people to produce those feeds. Which, though it may seem trivial to you and me, and may in fact be almost trivial if it’s only posting something somewhere with a couple of agreed-upon tags, is in fact not trivial if the reaction to “posting with agreed-upon tags” is “Huh?”

The conceptual barrier is really formidable.

Agreed. But are you saying that Bob, whom I know locally and trust, is /less/ credible when I read/watch/hear him over the Internet versus more conventional modes? If so, why? Because I suspect it might not really be Bob coming through that pipe? Because when my experience of Bob happens in an Internet context I have different expectations of Bob?

I am definitely considering hair-trigger abuse reporting, but I have to agree that trusted feeds (and users) are the first line of defense against abuse. I think that if you can get people to buy into the overall community (virtual or physical) you can expect their behavior to be more self moderated.

Anyway, great site!

I see a different interpretation. For people who are just beginning to come into the Internet, they often view it like a NewsPaper, meaning that the content has been edited, validated and is 100% trustworthy. I think that is the view that many people have of a newspaper even though somewhere inside they know it is not true. And they apply this same perspective to the internet : what is there must be authoritative.

And while they have trusted relationships with each other, they know that what Bob is saying may not be 100% accurate, but it’s Bob. They know how to filter what he is saying. But what is on the internet should have a higher level of authority and validation, and Bob doesn’t have that.

It takes a while for people to understand that the internet includes, in addition to newspaper content, lots of content from people with no official authority or acreditation, and that they as the reader need to begin making judgements about how much to trust one source over another.

They will eventually discover the networks of related contributors and be able to establish trust through transitivity (I trust Jon, so I will trust who Jon trusts).

This is a big learning curver for people to go through, especially those who are not in the high-tech business.