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.