Can we trust the internet?

L. Motl has an interesting post Influence of blogs and antiblogs, where he discusses how the proliferation of blogs leads to a dissemination of false information throughout the internet and that many people tend to believe that if a blog is popular then we can trust it. In fact, this is true for any homepage in the internet making it difficult for ordinary people to know which information is reliable and which is not.

Another aspect of this situation showed up last year when I gave a popular talk on cosmology as part of the activities for the International Year of Physics. At the end of the talk a school teacher came to me and told me that he likes to tell his students about the big bang, dark energy, black holes and other topics, but he is never sure if all this is science fiction or plain science. He gets all his information from newspapers and the internet but he is never sure about its seriousness. Of course, I told him that there are sites we can trust, like the Wikipedia, New Scientist, Nature and so on. This shows how serious the lack of reliable information can be and also that we have not only to write about science but also to show the places where reliable information can be found.