In reading the Morgan Stanley article by Mary Meeker, she mentions that if blogging is to continue into the future, “an aggregated rating/feedback system could expand the markets for the most serious bloggers.” I could not agree with her more in this respect. Presently, people often judge the integrity of a website based on the company who is sponsoring it. A person is more likely to trust information from the official “American Medical Association” website versus information slapped together sloppily on the “Jack’s medical advice” site. If we are to use blogs to derive information in the same way that we derive it from websites, there needs to be some way to decipher the author’s credentials. This poses somewhat of a problem given that most bloggers use pseudonyms and publicity is garnered via word of mouth. However, if something similar to E-Bay’s user rating system was initiated in conjunction with blogs, it could help people to differentiate credible authors and content.
Also, this is totally unrelated, but as I was looking through some of the syndicated guest blogs, I ran across this post by Scobleizer and think that this is really cool for anyone who tracks the stock market. It’s an RSS feed called Earnings Cast that contains the audio conference calls associated with companies’ quarterly earnings releases.
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