Interestingly enough, Howard Rheingold’s closing address at Reboot Britain yesterday talked about exactly that. How do we develop a ‘crap filter’?

He blogged about it here (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rheingold/index?blogid=108). Go check it out:

“When I began teaching my daughter how to evaluate the credibility of web pages, I started collecting rules of thumb, strategies, tools – especially free and easy to use ones – for sorting the goodinfo from the badinfo. Fortunately, tools are far more powerful today than they were a decade ago; the bad news is that too many people don’t know about them. In recent years, as so many more people have started to rely on the web for such vitally important forms of information as news, medical information, scholarly research, investment advice, the lack of general education in critical consumption of information found online is turning into a public danger. No, Bill Gates won’t send you $5 for forwarding this chain e-mail, the medical advice you get in a chat room isn’t necessarily better than what your doctor tells you, and the widow of the deceased African dictator is definitely not going to transfer millions of dollars to your bank account. That scurrilous rumor about the political candidate that never makes the mainstream media but circulates as email and blog posts probably isn’t true. The data you are pasting into your memo or term paper may well be totally fabricated.” [Howard Rheingold]