I just spotted this article on the BBC in which Sir Tim Berners-Lee discusses, amongst other things, the issue of trust on the internet.  It caught my eye as it follows neatly on from all of the discussion that has been generated by Claire's recent post on trust in different media, which was covered by Roy Greenslade in his Guardian blog too.

Although the focus is on science (mention is made of the alleged potential for Armageddon of the LHC experiment) his comments are relevant to the online media / social media measurement debate too:

 “Sir Tim told BBC News that there needed to be new systems that would give websites a label for trustworthiness once they had been proved reliable sources”

It’s an interesting concept, but if a system like this was to be developed, it would throw up as many questions as it does answers.  For example, what effect, if any, it would have on people’s opinion on the trustworthiness of online sources?  Who or what would do the scoring of all the sites out there, and once that was agreed, how could such a large project be undertaken?  What methodology could possibly be appropriate for all sites on the web - an area that my Metrica colleague Ria has touched upon previously.   Ultimately, would people trust the trust score itself?!

It occurs to us that this magic bullet approach to rating online trust will no more work than it does when being applied to PR measurement via the myriad of different scoring systems that other vendors offer.  Just as no one score can possibly be accurate when attempting to measure all of the factors that contribute to every organisations' PR,  it would be impossible to create one metric that measures the reliability or trustworthiness of all online sources for all audiences.

Incidentally, if, like us, you're struggling to understand what the Large Hadron Collider is all about, this video sums it up brilliantly!