Jay has been expressing his Mass Confusion... Information overload

 I'm getting all kinds of advice, but I'm not sure who to listen to at times because I really don't know who really knows what their talking about

I left a comment to this post

You can't be wrong on a well read blog without being told so, by people who know more than you.

It happens to me all the time on my blog. I'm wrong, and I get set straight. In 5 years, I'll be much more right, more often. It's kind of a peer review system, and I think it works.

In a comment, here Jay feels misunderstood

Jay is right, there’s a lot of bad info out there (and not all of it comes from my blog), and I think I do understand Jay’s frustrations. Sure, if you do a simple Google search, and implement the first idea that pops up from a blog hit, you’ve got problems.  But I’d say you’ve got bigger problems than the big evil, anarchy of the blogosphere if you’re blindly following blog posts. When I read an unknown blog and the person is talking tech, I take it with a grain of salt.  Other blogs from people I know, I pretty much take as gospel.

Is this a problem isolated to blogs?

I don’t think do. When I was in grad school writing articles for psych journals, there was this one journal The Psych Record where anyone could get published if they paid a fee, and wasn’t seriously reviewed. The result? The community knew this and didn’t fully trust the content.  How was a person to know?  By being a part of the community.

How about white papers?  They've been around forever and you really can't trust them either.  Often there's no peer review at all. Often there’s a big hidden agenda.  And you can't comment on a white paper!

So, I don’t think this problem is isolated to blogs.  Sure, in one respect the problem is worse (everyone has a blog) but in another more important respect, the problem is much better – Everyone reads blogs too.

I guess my point is that because blogs are heavily peer reviewed, they can be trusted, in fact, I think you can trust a well-read blog more than many other forms of communication.

So how do you navigate the waters of the blogosphere, and find the truth?

You learn who to trust, and who not to trust. by being involved in the community.

So what can we do to make things better?

Yes we can make this better! We're trying here at CodeBetter... In fact, if you read the CodeBetter.Com Manifesto, item # 2 in our bylaws is about Participation:

Participation, Self-Monitoring and Professionalism
Posts posted to the main feed should be relevant to software development, consulting, .NET, project management, etc.Personal posts, especially politics and religion, shall not appear on the main feed, but can be posted to your own blog. You are encouraged to subscribe to the main feed, and comment on other CodeBetter.Com posts.

Everyone can help things by commenting on posts.  A simple “Agree” on many posts may really help us charter a more clear path.

But don’t take my word for it.

-Brendan