This was my most highly-anticipated session, a discussion led by Janet Stemwedel of Adventures in Ethics and Science blog, which wrestled with the issues of factual accuracy, comment moderation, and other responsibilities bloggers have to their readership.

One contributor brought up the “Science News Parabola,” where, as a scientific paper is approaching publication, the scientific accuracy increases, peaking at publication, and then becomes communicated with less and less accuracy in press releases and the media. It should be noted that this blog is part of the downward curve in scientific accuracy, a natural result of my lack of a scientific background.

I was glad to see the issue brought up that readers need to become more savvy. It isn’t enough that we maintain factual accuracy, if readers can’t tell the difference between a blogger communicating his or her best approximation of truth and an intellectually dishonest scientist like David Deming, then any measure of accuracy achieved is worthless.

There was a huge learning curve that came with e-mail, where urban legends swept like wildfire across the web. Now people know to fact check the e-mails they receive against sites like snopes. I think learning that they could not trust everything they read online led to questioning everything else, from running to FactCheck to verify Political rhetoric, to catching Ted Koppel’s embarrassing presentation of forged documents.

It was noted that blogs have the power of instantaneous peer-review, and I know I love it when real scientists post corrections to my comments. I love it even more, when I post something under debate, and commenters engage the disputation, usually without resolution, but at least with everyone coming away from the argument more educated. I’ve found that nothing inspires me to hit the books like when someone challenges my position on an issue.

At the same time, another commenter brought up the issue of blogs having the power to spread disinformation as well, citing the Grand Canyon-Creationist Book Controversy, where bloggers incorrectly spread the news that the Grand Canyon bookstore was selling a creationist text. Once true, but no longer. The blogosphere corrected the mistake, but, as with print media, the correction got less attention than the original story, albeit more attention than print media gives their corrections.

My first reaction is that this is an unfeasible idea. Maybe if bloggers only wrote about science in their own field of expertise, but bloggers write about a wide range of topics from their research, to movies, to politics, books, music, and accounts of their personal lives. No system can accredit such diversity of content.

So how about just accrediting specific posts? The posts would need to go out first and get Certification later; otherwise, bloggers would suffer delays in getting their content out. Once certified, the blogger could put a certification icon on the post, but by that point the blog has moved on and readers won’t notice unless the blog claims their bragging rights with another post.

However, such a system of after-the-fact certification of blog posts could be used to establish a directory of factually-accurate articles that people may reference. This way, blogs could become official citations in places like Wikipedia, thus dramatically improving their respect when compared to traditional media.

Who’s going to run the certification process? Perhaps it would be like Peer-Review journals, where the organization keeps a directory of experts on hand who review submitted blog posts and advises the board of which to include in the directory of peer-reviewed posts. Because blogs really aren’t profitable, the Certification Board and peer-reviewers’ efforts would be voluntary (although there could be a marketable product here that submitters might pay for).

Of course, my own blog wouldn’t have anything to do with the process, being neither an expert or a scientist blogger; however, I would appreciate having such a resource online to reference, since including citations from it would greatly improve the legitimacy of my own posts.