See that drop on the left? That’s the 75% dip in United Airlines stock price last week, caused by a six year old story about UA’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy application appearing in various aggregated newsfeeds, and taken as a current story.

It’s an interesting example of the speed and interconnectedness of information flow on the web, and of course, the often missing discipline of fact checking.

I was reminded of the story as I read about Tim Berners-Lee’s ideas for improving the accuracy of information on the web, not so much the accidental republishing of factual evidence, but the deliberate framing of rumour-as-fact that makes up some of the velocity of information on the web.

TBL cited the ‘implosion of the World when the Hadron Collider switches on’ as an example of the ‘bad science’ that gets passed as fact (more on this at Techmeme.

Trust and accuracy are of course, old concepts in all media, and this isn’t the first time that trustworthiness on the web has been discussed, in despairing tones (note my lack of citation :-)

As always, I’m interested in how the ‘cutting edge’ of the general internet shapes ideas inside organisations.

As organisations’ information and extertise flows start to peel away from the traditional information holders and instead emerges from employees-as-experts in a non hierarchal ways (e.g. from wikis and other organic information sources), will the same anxieties about trust and reliability start to emerge?

I think yes; last week, for one of my clients, I developed a spec for how people can be featured prominently in search results from their Confluence-powered wiki.

Feedback was great – but one of the things I overlooked was how important it was to signify reliability for that person’s contributions; people were keen that someone wasn’t featured as an ‘expert’ simply because they’d made a lot of contributions on a subject.

It’s an interesting problem – in this specific instance, we’ll build in peer-reviews of wiki pages as an auto-arbitrator of quality, but in a broader sense it poses the same questions that are asked of sources on the web; how can I trust this information/person?

On the web, as with real life, you tend to trust people you know more than those you don’t – I pay attention to a handful of trusted guides/curators on the web, knowing their personal biases, how much they value their own reputations, their personal interests etc.

But I’m not seeing those ‘trusted guide’ roles emerge as strongly in organisations yet, at least not as published activities (they of course exist within informal ‘off grid’ private networks via friendships, colleague introductions and so on).

The ‘new experts’ in companies really have their work cut out; they will have to both defeat the old preconceptions of organisational hierarchy/expertise, and build their reputation profiles anew.