On the Internet, Bill Gates would like to give you some money, the LHC will create a black hole that will swallow the Earth, and Vernon Kay died in a tragic yachting accident. On the Internet, Russian women are ready and willing to fly to your nearest airport and marry you, and you can increase the size of your penis exponentially if you just hand over your credit card details.

On the Internet, you can write pretty much anything you want. The Internet hands everyone a way to say anything that enters their heads: it takes mere seconds to sign up for a blog, join a forum, create a website, or edit a Wikipedia page. And you don’t have to do any of that with your real name, so you can claim all kinds of expert knowledge or insider information that you don’t really have. Of course, not everything written online is ever read by anyone, let alone by many people - but some things are, and with all that data flying around it’s often difficult to separate truth from fiction.

I remember when I first read about Heath Ledger’s death. I thought it was a prank - enough other celebrities have been the victims of hoaxes claiming that they’ve died that it just seemed really, really unlikely. I apply that same level of cynicism to most things I read online: if something doesn’t seem to be true, I’ll check before believing it. But even so, sometimes a rumour can be picked up and reported as truth in many, many places before anyone corrects it. So how do you check?

Sir Tim Berners-Lee this week suggested that there needed to be a system of rating websites on their trustworthiness. Sounds great in principle, until you start thinking about the logistics of such a project, and even Berners-Lee acknowledges that it would be problematic to implement. Or even impossible. After all, who would you appoint to designate sites reliable or dubious? How much of the web would need to be labelled - and how long would it take to get them all tagged up? Anything with any kind of user-generated aspect would instantly have to be labelled untrustworthy, but then surely that’s where a lot of useful and valuable information comes from in the first place?

Urgh. As full of inaccurate information and outright lies as the Internet is, I think the best solution will just be to use common sense - and a healthy dollop of scepticism.

The short answer to that question is: yes, seems to be!

Like everyone else, I downloaded Google’s new browser yesterday and set about playing. Thus far, I’m finding it a marked improvement over my previous browser, which was some iteration of Firefox 2. It’s speedy and doesn’t leak memory - and, most importantly, hasn’t crashed at all yet. Each tab in Chrome is a separate process, so if one tab goes down it won’t drag everything down with it, but I’ve not managed to cause a single “sad tab” yet. (Only a matter of time, I’m sure.)

While one day isn’t really enough to test drive a browser, I’ve stumbled across a few little touches that I’m really enjoying - like the way you can grab the corner of a text input box (e.g. the Wordpress box I’m typing into right now!) and resize it. So, instead of just being able to see a small section of this post, I can make the box big enough to display the whole thing. I don’t actually need to do that, but, um, well… I might? At some point?

I like the way you can drag separate tabs out into their own windows, too. And I like that all my bookmarks and settings have all been copied straight over. I like the idea of a home page that displays all your most-visited sites, so you can jump straight to them, and I am loving the intelligent address bar. The ability to browse “incognito”, so that Chrome doesn’t store the sites you visit in an incognito window in your history, is potentially quite useful, and I’m loving how clean and tidy and aesthetically pleasing the browser is. I’m sure I’ll run into some problems at some point, because nothing’s ever perfect, particularly in its first iteration, but so far, I’m a Chrome fan.

Not convinced? You can read about the joys of Chrome via the medium of webcomic here. Even if you don’t end up downloading the browser, the comic’s pretty…