Just ran across this post on Feed for All by Sharon Housley. Sharon talks about online credibility and while I think she severely overestimates the confidence people have in online sources, there are some good points at the end.
Full Disclosure
Like traditional journalists, bloggers, publishers, and webmasters should fully disclose relationships and expertise when writing about a specific field or providing advice on a topic where they have a personal interest. Publications and publishers should always maintain transparency between advertisements and editorial content.
Very true. With services like Pay per Post coming online it's becoming harder to distinguish the shills from the writers.
Date Content
Quality publishers should make an effort to date content. Perhaps the statistical information was accurate at one point in time but due to the passage of time, is no longer an accurate reflection of current trends. Any statistical information should be framed with dates in which the data was collected. Additionally all factual information should be framed with dates.
I completely agree with this, but find it ironic that Sharon did not date her own article. I guess she doesn't consider herself a "quality publisher" :)
There are more points in the article near the end that are worth reading.
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I'm glad you liked the article. The RSS feed which actually "syndicated" the article was dated. That said most sites do not appear to be posting the "PubDate". I'll make the date more obvious in the future.
Posted by: Sharon Housley | July 28, 2006 8:37 AM | Permalink to Comment