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I get that sometimes, which says a lot more about my own insecurities and the extent to which the social Web replicates the social dynamics of high school than it does about any real risk. My social network includes some very forgiving, open-minded people... and the online world is much, much bigger than anything I've tapped into so far.

Just an example: when I look through the list of the top 100 Vancouver Twitterers by number of followers, I don't recognize the vast majority of names. That tells me that a big conversation is going on (or a lot of small conversations) that I'm not a part of.

Which is cool. It's a big ol' blogosphere, and I can't possibly hope to keep tabs on any more than my small corner of it.

It's also a handy reminder to avoid the temptation of generalizing about the social Web from our own experience if it. For any of us who wants to understand how the Web and the way we use it are evolving and make some intelligent guesses about the future of social media, breaking out of our comfortable little circles and exploring a little is critical.

More Noise to Signal.

During the last few months, BlogRize's founder Jesse Spaulding has been working on a major redesign of the site, which he is rolling out today. The new design features an enhanced voting system, updated ranking algorithms, and a lot of updates to the user interface that make using the site a lot easier and more fun.

BlogRize creates a community of readers around specific blogs and then generates an individualized Digg-like site for each community, where the ranking of the stories depends on the recommendations and votes of other group members (among other things). While you can submit stories to BlogRize directly, the main conduit through which users add stories to the system is through recommendations in Google Reader.

User Interface

A lot of the user interface updates to BlogRize are quite useful. You can now, for example, toggle story previews and see in-line comments from your friends right on your BlogRize homepage. This new version also allows you to quickly mark a story as read by simply clicking on the white space around the story.

On nice addition to BlogRize's feature set is its ability to find your profiles and activity on other sites through Google's Social Graph API. This makes importing your profiles a lot easier.

Most importantly, however, Spaulding has streamlined the voting system, which was one of our few complaints about the earlier version. Unlike Digg or Reddit, where you can only vote a story up or down, BlogRize allows you to mark a story as 'interesting,' 'funny,' 'disagree,' 'seen this already,' or 'inaccurate.' BlogRize also looks at links to stories from other blogs and takes these into account when it ranks its stories as well.

Join the RWW BlogRize Community

Jesse told us that his focus while developing and redesigning the service was on giving bloggers an opportunity to create and promote their own blog communities, and after this redesign, BlogRize has become an every better place for blog readers to get together in a relatively small but focused group. Thanks to this focus and the self-selection of the group members, the recommendations are always spot-on.

If you want to join the community of RWW readers on BlogRize, just click here and sign up for the service.

Rumors Gone Wild

Specifically, Noughton cites a rumor that Michelle Obama, wife of US presidential candidate Barack Obama, was caught on video tape hurling a racial epithet about white people. The rumor started on Larry Johnson's No Quarter blog. His source? "Someone in touch with a senior Republican" who knows that a "major McCain backer has a copy of the tape." Later, Johnson says he's learned more about the tape via "five separate sources who have spoken directly with people who have seen the tape."

Despite the clear lack of a credible source, the rumor had serious legs. From friend of a friend of a friend hearsay, to a mention on Fox News as "credible buzz," to Obama being asked about it by a reporter from the well-respectd McClatchy News Service. "So the story whirls around the echo-chamber of the paranoid, right-wing blogosphere, with the odd whisk from Fox News reporters, until it reaches hysteria," says Noughton. And though no tape has surfaced, damage has potentially been done.

Therein, perhaps, lies a danger in putting too much credence in the blogosphere and citizen journalism. At times having untrained eyes on the ground can be invaluable at getting the story reported, and sometimes citizen journos can beat the mainstream press to a breaking story. But when your sources are relying on rumors heard from friends, lending credence to those rumors by mentioning them in the mainstream press is toxic.

We've seen rumors run wild on the tech end have real-world consequences as well. Last May when Engadget erroneously reported that Apple was planning to delay Leopard and the iPhone, the company lost $4 billion in market cap in an afternoon. Even though Engadget quickly updated its headline and story when Apple denied the rumors and said their source (a memo) was a fake, the story was frozen in time on Techmeme and in people's RSS readers with the wrong information.

The Solution

With the rise of Twitter, mobile video blogging, and other tools of citizen journalism, the news cycle is now seconds. With news rolling in non-stop 24 hours per day, the continuous, Twitterized cycle doesn't leave much time for fact checking -- speed matters. But that's not the future that Noughton hopes for.

When rumors published and repeated without checking the facts can have far-reaching consequences -- like influencing voters in a US presidential election, or knocking $4 billion off a company's market cap -- accuracy should count for something. Noughton provides a moral for the tale of the phantom Michelle Obama tape: "If confronted with online rumours, investigate first, report later."