Update: Thoughts on my first month in the blogosphere

I've received some nice comments on this post, but what really has me excited is the email I received last night from David Brin. In preparing that post I emailed Brin to confirm that the bit I remembered about reliability ratings was from the novel Earth and not a different book (my copy is in storage along with the rest of my collection of his work). I got an email back, and he sent a couple of links to related short stories on the web. The first covers the reliability issue through "ratings clubs". I want to contrast that to the suggestion of Urthshu who suggested a "social peer" program like stumbleupon.com. Ratings clubs would be good but I'm concerned about a small group having control over the perceived reliability of an author. This could be corrected for with multiple groups. Urthshu's suggestion of something like stumbleupon brings a greater diversity to the rating mix, but I think the rating system needs to be integrated into the blog post rather than a secondary site or browser extension. Keep your thoughts coming... I'll have more on this to come and of course another link from Brin (I haven't read the next one yet).

Thoughts on my first month in the blogosphere