Hints on establishing blog credibility

I was recently reading an article at work about the immigration raid at the Agriprocessors plant in Iowa and noticed a piece of the story that I hadn’t paid much attention to before.

After the Agriprocessors plant was raided by Federal immigration agents last May, a blog named “Postville Voices” was started by the “citizens” of Postville, Iowa, to defend the hiring practices of the plant. Unfortunately, it was later discovered that the CEO’s son and two of his friends were running the blog.

When I first read this story back in October, I didn’t think much of it. But now in light of our most recent class and our discussions of ethics, I’m thinking about it in a different way.

So I wondered: how is it that we determine what is a credible source in the online blogging world? There are some online-only sites, such as the Huffington Post and Salon, that have established a certain amount of credibility based on building a reputation.

But what about other blogs? How do we know when we stumble across some information on a random blog that it’s legitimate and credible?

For me, the obvious first answer is to check other sources to see what is being said elsewhere about the same topic. But what can we do other than that to evaluate how seriously a blog can be taken?

I found this blog post on “Evaluating Blog Credibility” that seems to offer some good tips. Some of the ones I like best are:

• The name of the author or organization and its contact information is made obvious on the blog


• Pay attention to what other blogs it links to – are they credible?


• Check the comments – are they free from spam? If they are, someone is probably actively maintaining the blog.

I found another blog post that recommends dropping the .blogspot.com suffix from your domain name if you have a Blogspot blog.

The article says that “approximately 75% of Blogspot blogs are spam blogs or 'splogs',” and it has a link to a study to back up its statement. If so many Blogspot blogs are not seen as legitimate, that tarnished image could affect the legitimate blogs on Blogspot.

I don’t have much experience with Blogspot, so I’m not sure if this holds true for other blogging sites. Wordpress, for example, seems to have a legitimate aura about it.

Does anyone else have information on the various blogging sites and which would be the more “professional” place to set up?