Credibility and Integrity in the World of Web 2.0

By Eric Anderson Dec 14, 2007

The list of new challenges that are presented by Web 2.0 initiatives is quite extensive. One of the most critical challenges, though, is credibility. In the absence of credibility, and/or integrity, your content becomes worthless.

Web 2.0 empowers us to leverage the collective intellect. When information is posted in good faith, it can drive value for everyone. That collective intellect is the basis of open source. By building on ideas and premises that have been set forth, it's possible to develop better ideas faster.

Critical Integrity Protection

Critical Integrity Protection includes:

The integrity of your authentication mechanism, to ensure that people are who they say they are.
The integrity of your platform, to ensure that your content cannot be erroneously or fraudulently changed.
The integrity of your authors, to ensure that they are providing their opinions and guidance in good faith.

What happens when Collective Integrity is Breached?

Accountability is an important part of any information management plan. People need to be held accountable for what they write. Anonymity is valuable in some concepts. As we talked about in the Enterprise Blogging article, sometimes anonymity can be a useful tool in helping to teach an organization more about candor. But ideas posted anonymously carry much less impact as there is no accountability.

By the same token, there are some out there that choose to write disingenuous content. Or even content that can be readily proved false. If that occurs, your credibility may suffer even more so than that of your anonymous colleague. Does that make sense?

With an anonymous comment or entry, the author is simply unknown. But if you compromise your integrity and/or credibility…YOUR identity is known to be soiled.