Snopes

For thousands of years, the truth of content has been an important issue in communication. People will create false rumors, often to create interest in an audience. As I’m sure you already know, this is still a common issue today. In fact, it’s only increased as spreading messages has become easier through advancements in technology. We see it every day in things like tabloid journals, chain mail, and more recently, blogging.

Snopes.com is a website that’s trying to tackle this issue. Snopes.com looks into common rumors and urban legends, researching to find out if they’re true or not. Due to their consistency of thorough, honest reports, Snopes.com has been profiled by several news networks such as: CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC News, and many others. People are tired of the rumors, and thirsty for the truth, as shown through the hundreds of thousands of hits received every day.

On a personal response though, Snopes.com doesn’t seem to offer the service they advertise as well as resources like Google News and Wikipedia. The cite is run by a husband wife couple who create almost all of the content on the website. Unfortunately, two people just aren’t good enough to keep up with amount of rumors being spread around the internet. I love the idea of Snopes.com, but the few times I’ve used it to find out about a rumor, there’s been nothing reported on what I’m searching for. As opposed to open sourced resources that accumulate knowledge from all over the internet, like on Google News and Wikipedia. This shows through the trend of interest around Snopes.com. On Google Trend, it shows Snopes.com to be searched less and less on Google. I believe this is due to the fact that their content just can’t keep up with the content of other websites that offer similar services. Unless Snopes.com changes their format, I doubt they’ll keep up with the competitors.