The quality of information

Last saturday I read an article in the newspaper (NRC bijlage zaterdag etc) about blogging and they had some nice facts (are they really true, did they check?)

When looking at the amount of people (on a global scale) that are having a blog you get a stunning 184.000.000 people blogging dispersed into <1%>

These are serious numbers and they are not all educated as a journalist. This does not need to be a bad thing and a lot of great stuff has come out of the blog community but there is a big alert popping up in me.

When I was a kid (or later a student) and I had to write a paper I had do do some research and in order to do this I went into a Library (big building with a lot of books) where I did my reasearch. From every piece of research I check the facts (in the books) or could see that the publication was in a book or other publication that had checked the facts for me. This learned me to judge the quality of the information and to do proper research. I also had to mention all my sources of information (don't see this that much anymore now in the internet era and have to admit I do not do this too often as well)

When looking at the current students they have total new ways of gathering information. A great source for example is wikipedia and I have heard people saying this is true because it's on wikipedia (or worse, because it's on the internet). We all know how easy it is to change information on wikipedia or the internet.

We also know that when people start blogging it's their opinion. This is a great thing and definately could enrich the information we get but we have to be carefull when reading. We need to look at who did blog this and what is his/her interest (so start reading my blog with a different view now:)

So in conclusion, yes blogging is great and the internet gives us a lot of new ways to deal with information but since the barrier to publish is so much lower we need to educate the people in judging the information instead of just accepting it as the truth