By James Eli Shiffer

From the moment I started Whistleblower, I found out that I had formidable competition from some web sites I had never heard of: places like ripoffreport.com and complaintsboard.com. They're often the first sites that pop up on search engines when people who are unhappy with a product or service try to find out if they have company. They're also the flip side of the web's wild world of product endorsement, which the Federal Trade Commission tried to bring some order to this week by requiring bloggers to disclose if they're being paid to shill for something.

The world of dissing companies and products is equally wild. At its best, consumers' ability to complain to millions about their defective dishwasher or crappy car wash keeps companies honest. And companies do respond, with rebuttals or mea culpas. At its worst, it's a megaphone for liars or those mounting ad hominem attacks. One of Ripoff Report's categories is "adultery." You can search those entries for yourself.

So where does that leave Whistleblower? The answer isn't as obvious as you might think. Of course, we don't publish random anonymous, potentially defamatory allegations. Such claims occasionally appear in comments on stories and blog posts, but we're working to police those more effectively. While I was live-blogging last year's election, I published reports from readers (for which I required their real names) about polling problems they were experiencing without confirming them. In that case, the importance of timeliness and the value of an instant forum to voters outweighed the potential harm of publishing something that was not quite right. I also counted on the self-correcting nature of the Internet - if they were telling me something completely off-base, I would hear about it and follow up.

For everything else, Whistleblower has investigated your allegations - and tossed some of them out after we found out the complaint was misdirected or just plain wrong. The team can't get to as many as we would like, so we're constantly thinking about ways to share more of your tips in a way that reflects the best of the web - a community in which every voice can be heard. But a newsroom sage long ago told me that often, the most important decision a journalistic can make is not to publish a story.

Still, I know Whistleblower can't ignore the world of online consumer gripes. Audrey Lazarus first got suspicious about her work-at-home business that I wrote about last month when she found online complaints from others who felt burned by Bankcard Empire. The company has vigorously responded to online attacks on its reputation. Ripoff Report features a lengthy assertion of Bankcard Empire's integrity, authored by Ripoff Report founder Ed Magedson, but sounding as if it was written by the company's PR department. Perhaps that was an effort to stay out of the defamation lawsuit that the company filed last month against eight people after they posted negative statements about the company on online forums.

The Ripoff Report's slogan reads, in part, "let the truth be known." Read down a bit further, and you'll find, "While we encourage and even require authors to only file truthful reports, Ripoff Report does not guarantee that all reports are authenic or accurate."

For the record, Whistleblower guarantees that what we report is accurate to the best of our knowledge, or we'll correct it. In the age of the free speech free-for-all, I'm confident that matters.