Hyperpolarization
Andrew Sullivan today:
"...CIVILIAN DEATHS: Several people have told me to look at this site - but its biases are so blatant and so hostile to the liberation, I'm not going there."
The site was iraqbodycount.
I don't think you could find a nicer example of the blogosphere's incentive being not truth-telling but hyperpolarization if you tried.
The interesting question is - what can we do about it? I'm thinking of an open-source trust filter, where trust can be assigned/redistributed. Hopefully, the worker bees on both sides would cancel each other out, letting the filter pick the signal from the noise.
This mechanism would reveal different info from, say, link aggregators - my guess is that the most trusted parties wouldn't be the most 'authoritative' in Technorati etc terms (aka linkage).
Whether or not you think this particular idea is cool, hyperpolarization is creating a huge market gap that is begging for a response.