On blogs and Boolean logic

The more time I spend reading blogs the less I have to write my own. I guess that's the way it has to be. I could dedicate myself to read through some of the most influential blogs and then try to echo their opinions. Or I could try to dismiss the blogosphere altogether and have a voice of my own that is authentic and find out too late that most of my writing is outdated because the collective intelligence of other bloggers can't be beaten by an individual. This is the paradox that every blogger must face.

Although there are some very practical mechanisms to help rank the value of blogs based on influence or referrals as implemented by sites such as Technorati, the amount of information we can gather from a query is limited to the amount of trust we can put on any particular blogger. I propose to extend these mechanisms in such a way that it is possible to make objective conclusions about what the bloggers are saying:

• Let's assume that everything that a blogger writes could be either TRUE or FALSE.


• The act of linking to other blogs can be interpreted as a judgment on the statement made by the first blogger. This judgment could again be TRUE or FALSE, always subject to interpretation. Although not important for the purpose of this discussion, let's agree to use the following notation:
  
  <a href="http://the.site.I.am.evaluating/permalink" class=true>
  
  where class can only assume one of two values: true or false (simple, isn't it?)
  


• As more bloggers participate in the process of evaluating the blogosphere, a powerful set of logic statements becomes available to make some interesting assertions.


• Because the evaluation is done at the level of a link, the real power of this mechanism is to distinguish between valuable knowledge found in particular posts and not in the blog as a whole.

A search engine adapted to use the qualifiers attached to each link would be able to find not just entries that match a particular criteria but be confident that the post itself is correct based on the qualification from all its referrers.

Furthermore, I realize that a more powerful set of qualifiers may be needed than just TRUE/FALSE, but for the purpose of this proposal I guess they are simple enough to understand. I will explore the possibilities of using a point system based on adjectives and still being able to use some discrete logic to make decisions about the quality of information.