Allvoices.com Adds Report Credibility Ratings to Citizen Contributions

Simple Meter Establishes At-a-glance Credibility of Contributed Reports and their Authors

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) February 25, 2009 -- allvoices.com, the worldwide civic and citizen news hub, today announced it has completed testing of its Report Credibility rating meter and has deployed it across the site in beta. allvoices' Report Credibility rating is a simple indicator found at the bottom of every news story which helps the allvoices community sort through uncensored citizen media reports to determine their trustworthiness. As an un-edited and un-filtered reporting platform, allvoices Report Credibility ratings helps users find the news that matters to them. Report credibility is determined by community interaction and response, reporter reputation and the power of the Allvoices intelligent news analysis platform.

"Allvoices is the only global, participatory news site providing users with a quick way to determine if what they're reading is credible," said Amra Tareen, allvoices founder and CEO. "Citizen media is one of the fastest growing and most important uses of the web, but recent abuses on other news sites have threatened to undermine the important work of most citizen contributors."

To address potential problems, allvoices devised the credibility system as a defense against fraudulent reports. "Allvoices' Report Credibility rating system uses machine intelligence and the wisdom of our community to indicate just how trustworthy each and every report in our system is for the reader. Trust is absolutely essential in participatory media, and this system was explicitly built to engender that trust for our users," said Dr. Sanjay Sood, allvoices CTO.

The algorithm behind the Report Credibility meter is a proprietary, multi faceted and adaptable approach to evaluating the trust worthiness of a report. At the core of the Allvoices' system are the everyday citizens and contributing-journalists that create news reports. The Report Credibility meter is an evaluation of the actual report content, as well as the reputation of the author of the report. As stories move through the different pages on allvoices the meter registers new levels of credibility, for both the story content and contributor. The final determination of credibility is evaluated on a number of criteria, including:

• How much does the community like or dislike content from the author?
• How much does the community like or dislike the actual report?
• How many other Allvoices contributors are reporting about the same thing?
• How many other mainstream sources have supporting content about the report?

Fueled by the near ubiquity of mobile, Internet-connected devices and free web publishing platforms citizen-powered journalism is a rapidly growing trend; anyone anywhere has the power to report news. Unfortunately, the promise of citizen media has been stifled by the difficulty of verifying the authenticity of contributed stories. allvoices has taken a leadership role in addressing this problem with a hybrid approach to computing report credibility. The power of the allvoices community merged with the power of the allvoices news analysis engine provides a consistent and reliable gauge of report authenticity. Either alone -- just people or just the algorithm -- would be insufficient, but a man-machine collaboration complements the strengths of each.

As users interact more and more with the allvoices platform, the system learns more about the user, which in turn allows allvoices to more accurately determine the authenticity of their reports. However, contributors to the site don't have to be long-time users. A new user can also have high credibility for their contribution as a function of time. When a new user reports a story it enters the allvoices system with low credibility. But, as the story moves through the site's three news cycles -- "This Just In," "Breaking," and "Popular" -- it gains credibility, and will appear as a top-ranked news item. In turn, the story credibility helps with the reputation of the new user.

Similarly, stories accumulate relevance and ranking based on how quickly they rise from local to global prominence. Based on allvoices' algorithms, reports and contributions from the community about a story may begin at the city level, gain popularity through the regional and country pages, and eventually propel the story to the front page where is viewed by the global allvoices audience. All news reports and contributions are geo-coded to cities, countries and regions

Using proprietary algorithms, allvoices utilizes more than 3,500 mainstream feeds and online sources of news to provide relevancy and context for user generated news. This provides a level of security and vets contributed stories for authenticity. Story rank on the home page is determined by the number and diversity of other sources citing the particular news event, and community-activity on the report. Anyone can contribute stories, and citizen journalists are further incentivized through Allvoices' Excellence in Citizen Media incentive program.

About allvoices, Inc.
allvoices' mission is to create a global community for sharing news, videos, images and opinions from multiple points of view that invoke an emotional connection between individual perspectives from around the world. A community of diverse, engaged and globally minded citizens serves as news reporters, opinion leaders and publishers to share with the world the realities on-the-ground. Allvoices.com brings together context, insight and diversity of opinions around a broad range of topics and issues on the global, national and local levels. allvoices is one of the largest global communities offering unedited and relevant news and perspectives in one place. Using a set of proprietary algorithms, allvoices utilizes professional and online news sources, blogs, images and videos to determine relevancy, foster credibility and maintain openness with each contribution made to the site.

For cell phone reporting and contributing:
International SMS - (Please check the coverage table at http://www.allvoices.com/sms)
+45 609 910280
+61 427 229537
+44 780 0000352
United States SMS
864237/VOICES (US)
MMS and Email
mms (at) allvoices (dot) com
report (at) allvoices (dot) com

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