Reliable websites to be branded by new WWW Foundation
15th September 2008
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the thinking behind the creation of the World Wide Web, has voiced his concerns over moral panics and disinformation that are spread so easily and quickly through the Internet, and has also come up with a way of decreasing the problem.
In light of his apprehension, he has launched the WWW Foundation, which will brand sites (similarly to what the Plain English Council already do) that have been found to be reliable, accurate and true. It is accepted that a universal branding concept may not fit every website that is authenticated, so the Foundation is preparing many different mechanisms.
An accepted concept would be different organisations, e.g. experts in the field of information relating to particular websites, getting involved with the Foundation to brand the content, rather than the Foundation trying to do it on their own. The Foundation will also work to make the internet more accessible, especially in third world countries such as Africa, where computers are not so plentiful.
Sir Tim is not resting on his laurels, being behind such a creation is impact enough, but he obviously believes his role does not stop there. He wants the world wide web to evolve in many ways, to move with the times and progress through the 21st Century. This is an inspiration to us all, those who create websites and content, the bloggers among us and those who use social networking sites to name a few, to support the WWW Foundation in its quest.
I think that we’ve heard this from TBL before haven’t we and the issues remain pretty much the same. There is no one objective version of the truth that everybody can agree upon. So, for instance, how would the organisation rate Creationist websites? Or those which question the science behind climate change predictions? Is TBL going to put his name to the ranking for Scientology which says that it’s complete nonsense? Good luck.
Although you could argue that what we have at the moment isn’t perfect, it is up to individuals to use their critical faculties to decide what they belief on different websites. Teaching young people how to evaluate different sources of information is far better than trying to rank every website on the web which would also be a huge waste of time for academics, surely?
Say somebody is willing to believe that a Large Hadron Collider* is going to create a black hole that will destroy the world. It’s also pretty likely they are also going to believe that the WWW Foundation is part of the conspiracy to suppress that “truth”. So, it’s an exercise in futility really.
* LHC and TBL are both at CERN which probably explains the timing of this announcement.