The director of the World Wide Web Consortium, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has told an audience at the launch of his new foundation that he had been discussing how the web can “help us filter good information from bad”.

In an interview with the BBC, Berners-Lee explained that he is increasingly worried about the proliferation of bogus information facilitated by his creation (that’s the internet for those who don’t know).

He said: “On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable…A sort of conspiracy theory of sorts and which you can imagine spreading to thousands of people and being deeply damaging.”

He said that the panic generated by the internet over the Hadron Collider’s likelihood of bringing the world to an end was an example of unscientific online panic.

Berners-Lee proposed solution to this apparent “problem” is to have some kind of centralised accreditation scheme for websites, and readers who are incapable of independent thought.

He argued, “I’m not a fan of giving a website a simple number like an IQ rating because like people they can vary in all kinds of different ways,” he said. “So I’d be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways.”

If this idea sounds familiar, it is certainly reminiscent of Tim Reilly’s ditched ‘blogging code of practice’, which was thought-up to attempt to control the more heated web bloggers. Luckily for Digg, Technorati and the like, the angry blog is alive and well.

Berners-Lee di offer some less controversial announcements, such as his new World Wide Web Foundation receiving a $5 million grant from the Knight Foundation to advance a web that is free and open, and “to expand the web’s capability and robustness, and to extend the web’s benefits to all people on the planet”.

What Berners-Lee’s foundation does exactly is not totally clear, but we do know that it plans to pursue its goals via technological innovation, web science and projects targeting underserved communities.

Berners-Lee said dramatically: “if the Foundation achieves all the things I can imagine now, we will have failed”.