As several folks rightly pointed out in comments here, a community site based on tagging and syndication is exquisitely vulnerable to abuse. In the first incarnation of the photos page, for example, a malicious person could have posted something awful to Flickr and it would have shown up on that page. Flickr has its own abuse-handling system, of course, but its response time might not be quick enough to avert bad PR for elmcity.info.
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Of course anything short of frictionless participation is an obstacle. On the other hand, based on my conversation with Paul English about customer service, there[base ']s a lot to be said for a required step in the process that forms a human relationship [~] attenuated by email, true, but still, a relationship.
I think it[base ']s even more interesting when the service, or site, is rooted in a geographical place. On the world wide web, I[base ']m always forming those kinds of relationships with people I will never meet. But on a place-based site, I may already have met these folks. If I haven[base ']t yet, I might still. Trust on the Internet has a very different flavor when the scope is local.
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Similarly, when it was suggested that people could produce news about the local issues where they are stakeholders and have important knowledge, the pushback was: [base "]But you can[base ']t trust random information on the Internet.[per thou]
I found that fascinating. Here were a bunch of folks [~] a hospital administrator, a fire chief, a school nurse, a librarian [~] who all know one another. What they seemed to be saying, though, is the Internet would invalidate that trust.
Now I assume that they trust emails from one another. Likewise phone calls, which are increasingly carried over the Internet. And if the fire chief wrote a blog that the school nurse subscribed to, there would be no doubt in the mind of John, the school nurse, that the information blogged by Mary, the fire chief, was real and trustworthy.
Until you join the two-way web, though, you don[base ']t really see how it[base ']s like other familiar modes of communication: phone, email. Or how the nature of that communication differs depending on whether the communicating parties live near one another.
If feeds begin to flow locally, it[base ']ll be easy to trust them in a way that[base ']ll supply most of the moderation we need. The problem, of course, is getting those feeds to flow. Bill Seitz asked:
So you think the [base "]average[per thou] person will have Flickr and del.icio.us accounts in addition to joining your site?
No, I don[base ']t, though over time more will use these or equivalent services. So yes, I also need to show how any online resource that[base ']s being created, anywhere, for any purpose, can flow into the community site. It only takes two agreements:
- An agreement on where to find the source.
- An agreement to trust the source.
In the short-to-medium term, those sources are not going to be friendly to me, the developer. So I[base ']ll have to go the extra mile to bring them in, as I[base ']m doing on the events page. [Jon Udell]
