“The Media Standards Trust is a group which has been working with the Web Science Research Initiative (I’m a director of WSRI) to develop ways of encoding the standards of reporting a piece of information purports to meet: “This is an eye-witness report”; or “This photo has not been massaged apart from: cropping”; or “The author of the report has no commercial connection with any products described”; and so on. Like creative commons, which lets you mark your work with a licence, the project involves representing social dimensions of information. And it is another Semantic Web application.”
The Media Standards Trust is welcome idea, although I think the most important thing is for the audience to always remain skeptical of any information coming from the media regardless of labels attached to news reports.
To ask questions and find the answers for yourself is easier than ever in the World Wide Web era.
Many useful things at Suda Projects, from Microformat cheatsheets to photography film logs and exposure cards.
“Back in 1990, Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder John Gilmore wryly noted that ‘the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.’ In a similar fashion, the distributed and portable nature of the open source community enables projects to mimic the self healing powers of the Internet to route around regional legal encumbrances and the barriers erected in monopolized markets.”