Trust

Bilder, Geoffrey; Lin, Jennifer; Neylon, Cameron (2015). Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructures-v1. figshare. Journal contribution. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1314859.v1

I try to not be boring about identifiers. Bilder, G. (2011). Identify This! Identifiers and Trust. Information Standards Quarterly, 23(3), 20. https://doi.org/10.3789/isqv23n3.2011.05

I was invited to speak at an internal Wiley-Blackwell seminar. Before the seminar, they interviewed me for their Publishing News. I can’t find a copy of the interview online anymore, so I have reproduced it below. I made several predictions in this interview, and it’s interesting to see which ones played out. As I review this (in 2024), I’m reminded of how insistent certain researchers were that publishers should make their articles easily available for text mining so that we could analyze the literature at scale. Of course, now we see researchers aghast that giant, well-funded AI companies have done precisely that to feed their LLMs. ...

Jon Udell and Ross Mayfield have are talking about the use of social software and trust-circles as tools to find relevant and authoritative content on the web. Sounds familiar. I’ve long thought trust circles (amongst other trust metrics) are key to addressing the “Internet Trust Anti-Pattern“. It may sound incredibly un-hip and reactionary, but to hell with the wisdom of crowds. Watching the crowd might be entertaining, but when I need to work, I can get far better results if I constrain that crowd to a few people whose opinions I have reason to respect. I’d use the word “authority” again, but the word is overloaded. Just as the open access community struggles with “free as in beer” and “free as in freedom”, the user-generated-content crowd struggles with “authority” as in “power” and “authority” as in “expertise.” ...

Will implementing a good information architecture destroy your Alexa rating? Mike Davidson has done a brief analysis of MySpace which basically shows that “Page Views” could be the new “Line Count” in stupid metrics. I’ve often wondered if part of the attraction of MySpace is the air of “authenticity” conveyed by the hideously amateurish interface(s)? And now I can wonder how many marketers will take Davidson’s observations and perversely conclude that the more unnecessary page views they can get people to go through, the better. Usability be damned. ...