Who do you trust?

Whether it’s our traditional distrust of authority or a symptom of the tall poppy syndrome, it appears bloggers are Australians’ least trusted information source. A September study by the local arm of Edelman PR found Australians regard bloggers as far less trusty-worthy than mainstream or Web-based media with a rating of only three per cent (interestingly, it’s silent of the subject of surveys by PR firms ;-)
2007 Edelman Stakeholder StudyTrust at the Crossroads in Australia
Am not sure if the statistic says more about Australians or Australian bloggers, and one data point does not a trend make, but it’s been a useful reminder to me that the growth user generated content (am not sure if that’s this week’s buzzword, heard a marketer call it ‘open source’ recently) is proceeding differently here than in the US (I suspect that’s true of other countries).I suspect the answer to the $75 question is that we Aussie don’t trust bloggers yet because we don’t know any -- analyst and Herald columnist Graeme Philipson wrote about the relative lack of blogging in Australia a few months ago in this column, and here’s a post from a leading Aussie blogger Ross Dawson on the subject –- though I’m not quite sure I can trust what a blogger says ;-)