One of the changes we made as part of the recent web site update was to draw attention to our site’s blog. Our plan for the blog is to use it as a source for interesting news stories about credibility issues and technologies online. We hope you will watch this blog and enjoy our view on credibility news. You can also use our site’s RSS feed to keep track of our blog in your RSS reader or homepage.

What does a numerical rating mean, and what effect does a number have on our perceptions and feelings of trust? This story at the New York Times explores the origins of a common wine rating scale, and asks what’s really behind the number.

Collaborative information sharing sites like Wikipedia present a unique set of challenges related to credibility. In Puppy Smoothies,  Tom Cross describes a method to highlight information that has “venerability” on these kinds of sites. The idea being that information that has persisted for a long time without being overwritten is good information. Does this mean that information that is overwritten frequently is more likely to be bad information?