Hi there. Welcome.

The worlds of fact and fiction were in stark contrast this week.

Maybe its just me... but i find myself thinking a lot about the word that Steven Colbert revealed a few weeks back "Truthiness".

Just so you don't think this is a world that is relegated to the world of late night cable comedy... the American Dialect Society voted truthiness as the word of the year. truthiness refers to the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true. As Stephen Colbert put it, "I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart;

Here are the events of the past week that lead me to think about truthiness as it relates to user-generated content.

First- James Frey and his book a million little pieces. But that's just the start.
Then - the front page NY Times story on New York Gubernatorial candidate William Weld. Weld - you may know - put up a bunch of newspaper articles on his web site about his campaign. Only he edited out anything negative, and put it under the newspapers masthead and reporters byline just the same.

And then - on the flip side - we have the two women, a democrat and a republican both arrested moments before the State of the Union speech for wearing t-shirts with slogan's on them. One supported the war, one in protest of it.

Which brings me to Truthiness.

The thing about the whole "million little pieces" controversy isn't how it ended, it was how the publisher responded when "the smoking gun" first revealed the fact that the facts of the book didn't add up.

Basically, they said "everyone knows that memoirs aren't really entirely true." Ok, noted. I didn't know that. I thought that publishers had fact checkers. And facts were facts. and fiction was -well - fiction.

Clearly it took the wrath of Oprah to scare everyone back into 'fact' mode. Too late. Publisher, Author, and even Oprah all slimed.

Next - William Weld. When confronted with the fact that he'd doctored newspaper articles before putting them up on his web site, a spokesman said - in effect - everyone does it. Truly - he compared doctoring newspaper articles to what the Hollywood Studios do when they take reviews out of context and use "Excellent" when the actual sentence reads: the film could have been Excellent. Sidebar, i now freeze my tivo and read the SOURCE of the boldface quotes in fast moving film adds. If it's some no-name reviewer like "Entertainment Joe" or "Sam's Movie Notes" i know that the film couldn't get real critics to say anything nice.

My point is that the whole trend away from fact vs. fiction toward a world of 'truthiness' is teaching the audience a critical message.

All media comes from a point of view. So user-generated content, which has an author, and pov, and authenticity, starts to move into the mainstream.

Think about how you read blogs. You engage in voices.

So don't fear the current trend of 'truthiness' from publishers, politicians, or movie studios.

Instead, think of it as the coming of an era of authenticity.

Oprah may be pissed off... but she's not alone.

We want to know who's making our media - so that we can make personal judgments about the media we choose to engage.

I'm going to watch Rocketboom on my Tivo. See you later.