Online info...good or bad?

I want to discuss the idea of 'information overload' on the net. I think things like blogging are really cool, I quite like the idea of having an on line journal that anyone in world can read and comment on.

I was reading this book for the assignment and they said that the promise of the internet was that anyone could have their say, but that in reality only those who knew how to program a webpage could actually, effectively have their say. Blogs kind of take this to the next level because you don't need to have any webpage knowledge to actually have your say. I think it's great because it basically means that anyone with internet access can contribute to web content, but this also means that there is a great load of information out there... and sometimes it gets difficult to tell what's good (or true) info and what's just opinion or someone just pretending they know what they're on about.

So while it seems like such a great thing (that we can all now contribute to the net), when reading blogs, one should tyically keep in mind that they are not of the same quality as say, a published book. But I guess that blogs could kind of be compared to newspaper 'letters-to-the-editor' pages. Newspapers seem like official, legitimate media, but opinions pages should be read with caution, with the same sort of content as blogs. Because if you think about it, the web isn't entirely just opinion and non-legitimate content. There are many 'official' websites (think CNN, BBC etc) that can be trusted, and sites like wikipedia that could be called 'self-modifying', in the sense that if some info is wrong, people can correct it if they know better until the info that is provided is the most recent and most accurate.

So while many people beleive that you can't trust net content, it's not all bad!