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January 24, 2006
ALOUD on The Off-Ramp with Craig Newmark
Through a special collaboration with 89.3 KPCC, ALOUD on the Off-Ramp extends the insightful discussions of ALOUD at Central Library to allow both audience members and listeners the unique opportunity to engage each other in an informal exchange of ideas beyond the live lecture and performance series held regularly at the Downtown Central Library.
ALOUD on the Off-Ramp will present thought-provoking questions posed by participating guests from the award-winning series. 89.3 KPCC and ALOUD at Central Library invite you to join in and respond by voicing your own opinions and viewpoints.
Presented by the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, in association with the Los Angeles Public Library, ALOUD at Central Library presents over 75 live events a year and provides a public forum for discussion and ideas from some of today’s brightest writers, thinkers, and innovators.
On Tuesday, January 24, 2006, as part of the WIRED Speakers Series presented by ALOUD, Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist.org, sat down with WIRED Magazine Articles Editor Thomas Goetz to discuss the implications and future of the community-run website. Newmark, a self-professed “nerd,” started craigslist in early 1995 as a means of better connecting people by letting them know about cool or useful events happening around San Francisco. The site rapidly grew and flourished into one of the Internet’s most popular destinations, a large online community, used to find anything from a house to a job, a wheelbarrow to a French teacher.
Craig Newmark posed the following question for ALOUD on the Off Ramp:
Given the increasing importance of Internet-based news and information sites (think Wikipedia, About.com, Web-MD, etc.), how do we counter disinformation attacks that use fraudulent information?
Click on the comment link below to send us your feedback.
Posted by ALOUD at 12:06 PM
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There's no technological alternative to a healthy dose of skepticism. Unalloyed misanthropy is also good.
Posted by: Doug on January 25, 2006 8:36 AM
Name use OK , but not e-mail address.
It's necessary to have some substantiation of experience or understanding of what one may be talking about when others
might rely on what is posted.
It would be difficult , but part of the necessity, if those posting thoughts or information would show some basis for their comments.
Also my feelings are that multiple sources, at least two, of the information used is needed.
JoeB
Posted by: joeB on February 1, 2006 9:48 AM
While I agree with Doug that a healthy dose of skepticism is our best weapon against fradulent information, I disagree that technology can offer no solutions. I see a future where a search engine, say google, can help us. Google could use its its search powers to cross check articles or web pages, giving us a ranking or percent of accuracy. For example, say I go to a conservative political blog, the search engine would cross reference the content with established providers of facts, and then provide an accuracy ranking, wich would help one determine weather the site or article could be trusted.
I think the question alludes to something deeper though. The fact that this was posed on a public radio forum points to the fact that we are already a skeptical audience, not satisfied with the incomplete, filtered news available elswhere. We are trained skeptics, and probably not as succeptible to the disinformation propagated by political blogs, pseudo-news sources and the like. The real question is how do we foster a more inqusitive society? How do we teach others to question?
Posted by: Rudy Valenzuela on February 1, 2006 10:50 AM
Rudy, that's an interesting prospect, although I'm not always confident that that linked references offer much insurance against confusing someone else's imagination for facts. If I write on my blog that Rudy only eats the feet of a chicken and someone links to that writing your biography on Wikipedia wouldn't it be a documented fact that you don't like thighs?
Posted by: Doug on February 4, 2006 4:39 AM
