Sorting the Web's wheat from the chaff

You've probably seen that the much-anticipated second annual Knight News Challenge awards have been handed out.  And the big news has this headline: World Wide Web inventor gets Knight grant.

Tim Berners-Lee's grant aims to do something with tagging (yes, think metadata) that we've needed for a long time: Create a way to sort out credible news from the rest of the stuff. Here's how the plan is sketched out by Knight:

The public needs more help finding fair, accurate and contextual news. This project will create a system to do just that. The plan: to design a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of “source tagging.” For instance, a reporter could note that an article was based on personal observations, interviews with eyewitnesses or specific, original documents. Filters would then use this data - the “story behind the story” - to help find high-quality articles. A reader searching the phrase “Pakistan riots” for example, might find 9,000 articles. But filtering by “eyewitness accounts” would yield a more selective list. Berners-Lee, Moore and the Web Science Research Initiative are working with the BBC and Reuters on how to best integrate the tagging into journalists’ normal workflow.