Vetting sources on social news sites.

One thing that we take for granted as power-users is our ability to do domain lookups and Google searches to figure out who’s behind a domain name. Most folks online don’t know how to do this, and/or they don’t take the time to do it.

The Netscape Anchors have found a really great way to help the social news audiences recently: investigate site owners. Now, I’m not saying they’re doing this in any kind of a “gotcha!” way. Nope, they are just getting the facts together to give the folks who are reading the stories and idea of who’s behind the news/opinions they are reading.

Dakota Smith, who worked with me at Silicon Alley Reporter, just looked into the site OpEdNews.com which has been posting their stories who’s authors have been posting their stories to Netscape (it’s some sort of a news aggrigator). You can see the results here:

http://politics.netscape.com/story/2006/07/24/uk-govt-sources-confirm-war-with-iran-is-on/

The person who runs this site is named Rob Kall ( http://www.robkall.com/ ) and he is a very interesting character (as you might suspect). He’s describe’s himself as “speaker, consultant, therapist, inventor, entrepreneur, writer,” and he runs a number of sites including:

http://www.futurehealth.org/
http://www.sphincterpolice.com/
http://www.storycon.org/
http://www.4stressmanagement.com/

What would you add/change to this process? I have two things:

1. I think we should ask the public to comment on the site and send in information they have about the site owner.
2. Also, I think we should get the job history of the site owner.