Jon Udell: "There will have to be some way to invest third parties with the power to mediate trust." The role of trust was a theme last week at Yale University's Revenge of the Blogs conference. After the conference, I had a brief conversation last Friday with Jenny Levine, the Shifted Librarian, about one of the difficulties she anticipates implementing blogs and RSS for public librarians in Illinois. We share a common concern - how do we authenticate the identity of an RSS feed?

Why is this important? When public information folks like librarians (or judges, as I'd like to see) begin relying on RSS publish/subscribe to exchange information on a macro scale, what's to stop a malcontent from spoofing an RSS feed to provide disinformation? Will the incremental building of trust in the blogosphere be enough? Or will we have to build systems that ensure trust at the machine level?