Thanks to David Rothman at TeleRead for the link to an interesting story: Validators, by Andy Oram. In the vein of Richard Stallman’s The Right to Read, or portions of David Brin’s Earth, Oram’s short story investigates the repercussions of a society in which a group, the Validators, serve as trusted arbiters and advocates of the truth. Of course…there’s always the problem of watching the watchers, and the story digs into the implications. It’s a bit rough around the edges, and the ending is abrupt, but the ideas are good. The challenges of such issues as distributed trust metrics, megadata mining, and information society economics are well-represented here. It’s worth a read.