Miscellaneous Communications in an Age of Structured Data

Having tried and failed for two weeks to find time to give Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder

the thoughtful consideration and worthy review it deserves after hearing author David Weinberger speak at last month’s Managing Electronic Records Conference, the recent distraction of responding to several bloggers’ misinformation and misunderstanding of financial regulation got me thinking. Shouldn’t there be a voluntary Internet communications standard for people to use to support the assertion of facts?

The de facto standard is now to simply hyperlink from an assertion to supporting information. A more effective standard would make it easier to trace the development of an assertion and give users opportunities to validate and contest the assertion. Wikipedia is a good start, but it lacks the capability of a structured standard like XBRL for business reporting, which, as @cybercpa points out on Twitter this morning, is all about “the information supply chain.”

One challenge would be distinguishing fact from opinion, but with an apparent increase in the assertion of opinion as fact as professional journalism becomes democratized (including by professional journalists flailing about to keep up with the Internet technology that’s turned their worlds upside down), a rules-based system for making the distinction usable by and accessible to the general public (as opposed to the almost proprietary professional standard I learned in journalism school 25 years ago) could only help.

This obviously requires much more thought, but suffice it to say — Charlie Hoffman doesn’t know how big a revolution he’s started.