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How
does a social tool that crowdsources local news and
local gossip like the Zipper encourage the accuracy of
information provided since everyone has access to upload
local news reports and invariably, there will be false
or misleading information? Great question and it's a
complete 360 from the old way of insuring accuracy with
traditional news outlets. Let's take a look at accuracy
and how the more angles we have on a given story, the
better the probability that's it correct. The tools
we've built into the Zipper are solely aimed at
encouraging and corralling this self-correcting effect.
The
other day, I was on Amazon checking out a book. It
looked interesting but how could I really know. I
wasn't in the book store where I could thumb through it
or check out what other's had said about it on the
cover. Amazon was so smart in creating the customer
feedback section of their site as it address just this
issue as other's give reviews, some helpful, other's
fluff about a particular item which you can read before
purchasing. For this given book, there only 2 reviews.
That's not exactly a confidence booster. Look, let's be
honest. One of them is probably the author and the
other is probably the author's mom. This goes to the
heart of crowd vetting situations whether it's judging
the purchase of a book or deciding how much trust to put
into a local news update on a social tool like the
Zipper. Sheer volume of response (hopefully
corroborating) a given story adds validity and there's
some breaking point in terms of number or response after
which, we can be pretty certain that a given local news
or local gossip story is likely to be accurate. I ended
up not buying the book and as simplistic as my decision
may be, a few more reviews (in the positive) on Amazon's
feedback section probably would have ended in a
purchase. Let's turn our focus to local news now as it
operates in vary much the same way but instead of a
purchase, hearts and minds are won as a result of trust
in a story.
Traditional news outlets have a very different process
of "Vetting" a news story. In fact, to some extent,
this is the business they are in outside of pedestrian
desire to sell advertising. They are the arbiters of
what's true and accurate. It's works fairly well in
that we can be pretty confident that a local news story
in the paper or in the news is accurate. There's
downside to this process of "managing" news and
filtering stories that approach certitude. We lose a
lot of other stories for which the local news paper or
television station simply does not have the resources to
eye-ball witness or vet the information. There are only
so many employees and hours in the day at a local
newspaper. At some point, decisions have to be made a
newspaper can't print stories for which it doesn't have
a very high level of faith in the accuracy. So gain
accuracy but lose breadth. We're going the other way.
With
the Zipper, any post is a potential local news or local
gossip story. So we start with EVERYTHING, which is
both good and bad. Every story is news to someone so
that's the positive. There will be inaccurate
information however, either accidentally or with malice
intent. That's where all the over observers/news
posters come into play. If one of them discounts the
information, readers will inherently doubt the
information. If multiple people discount the accuracy,
the story will perform poorly via the Thumbs, or Zipper
system people can use to either confirm or deny a given
story. If the Thumbs consistently point "down", the
story will be blasted into oblivion (as should be).
This mechanism replaces the narrow filter of the local
newspaper editor and spreads this responsibility among
the masses. So we start with all possible local news
and local gossip stories and the readers get to decide
what's relevant and more importantly, what's accurate.
It turns the old model on it's head and personally,
we're excited about this new upside down world where the
reader has the power to decide what is local news.
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