Just Another Blog…Or Is It?

A few days ago, Judd Bagley came to speak to our class. I did a little research and read about him, not understanding why he didn’t have his own wiki page. However, nothing could have prepared me for his passion, drive, and the authentically animated character that he was! As he unraveled the story (in true journalist nature) about the naked short selling wikipedia article to his cyber-stalking detective work on Gary Weiss, who Judd found out to be was posing as several different screennames for wikis, blogs, and amazon reviews. That is the short of the story.

What I found extremely interesting from all of it, was the question of whether we really know that wikipedia isn’t being biased and banning certain people, or that an elite few are controlling the content. It is not limited to wikipedia either; but blogs, reviews, social networking profiles, all user-generated content should be taken into account. We can’t all be cyberstalkers and track down each person and his/her IP address to see if their Internet activity is legit. How can we trust UGC? and How can we prevent fraudulent users from using the Internet as their mask? How will we address security issues in the near future? Should cyberstalking be a respectable job? hehe I would find it quite entertaining. It’s like Nancy Drew via Internet.