No, I haven't seen the inside of the NYT. I've seen the outside, though, which goes to my point: somebody in that building is ultimately responsible for what goes in the paper. It's their editorial board.

I see what you mean about the market and bloggers. I don't have the time to comb through all the blogs, cross-check all the references, verify insofar as one can all the identities of all the writers. The medium's virtue is its fluidity, but that's also its weakness. The only way one can even begin to judge which ones are high-quality and which ones are crap is to immerse one's self in blogworld. There are not enough hours in the day.

I use certain time-worn hallmarks: the "About Us" page, the "Contact Us" link, any personal or corporate bio offered that can be crosschecked with a quick Google, and the "Last Updated" feature, for currency. I also do a random check for dead links. These are not unreasonable. They ought to be available.

The idea of having a kind of bloggers' editorial board or members' guild makes me happy. The people most involved in the blogosphere are the experts in this emerging field. They will know their own better than anyone else. Gamers, in another emerging tech field, have organized loosely to self-police the gaming world and to rate software so that parents and other adults who work with children can have some guidelines, a process that's working very well. The "Family Friendly Sites" group is another tech effort at voluntary self-organizing for quality control from the inside out. Bloggers can profit by their examples. The rest of us can profit by being able to look for a Bloggers' Seal of Authenticity or something, without having to invest months and months of time reading and checking up on a single source.