The Secret Mommy Orchestra will be playing around
…

Its about transparancy, and that means holding yourself as accountable as those whom you cover…

Anyway, to answer that question in that post, here’s the RSS feed for that blog: http://www.sfnblog.com/atom.php (Safari showed it automatically.)

Until newspapers have a better understanding how corrections work out here, and are willing to alocate resources to it, the problem will continue.

That is, unless Google’s new article comments feature catches fire–then Google would simply become the Paper of Record without ever having done any original reporting. Ironic, eh?

As for “drift”–I kind of get what Carr’s talking about (I think.) If you search your name on a regular basis, you might see certain content or blog post “drift” from the top spot to the bottom. You might also see different content under particular urls or misspellings of your name. I’ve seen this with google results for my name and blog over the past year (which has been a year of rapid change for me and my content.) So, content does indeed move around and “drift” in search–but the question of how to get it to drift down or be superseded by better, more relavent content is something of a mystery (at least I haven’t figured that out for myself just yet.) Maybe it’s a matter of super killer SEO. Then again, who really knows the mysterious mind of Google’s algorithm enough to “trick” it to put the good stuff first?

“A good search engine would provide the original story, the corrections, and the comments, and present them in an integrated fashion. We shouldn’t have to depend upon the policies of the organization that published the original story for this to happen.”

Also, I think we’ve really fallen under Google’s spell if we put that much value on and faith in how Google ends up ranking results. It’s a search engine—not a crystal ball. I often feel there’s something freakish or strange about the first few results and I view them with skepticism—in the very least wondering simply, “why is this the first result?”

As for Jeff Jarvis’ “content map,” I still don’t understand what that is.

I use a short PowerPoint (available at http://www.slideshare.net/macloo/kaycee-nicole-hoax/ ) to impress this example on students. If you don’t have Times Select, you can download it.

However, the last time I checked, the correction does not exit in the Lexis-Nexis archive version of the 2000 story.

Perhaps they have gotten complacent since Google makes billions while providing only mediocre search results. Librarians will tell you that many people are content with 10-20 references regardless of whether they are the best (or even relevant).

I’m sure everyone has had the experience of searching for something and being presented with a lot of irrelevant clutter. Do-it-yourself searching also means that the expertise of those who find information for others as a profession aren’t involved, so each person is left to their own level of ability.

A good search engine would provide the original story, the corrections, and the comments, and present them in an integrated fashion. We shouldn’t have to depend upon the policies of the organization that published the original story for this to happen.

I’ve written an essay on how the big three in the search engine business are controlling what is found and stifling competitive improvement. It’s on my web site, for those interested.

Speaking of corrections, may I correct this hysterical distortion of my words, even if it doesn’t quite rise to - gasp! - the criminal manipulation of history? (I need to correct it here because, alas, most links go unfollowed.) What I wrote, in part, was this:

“With search engine optimization - or SEO, as it’s commonly known - news organizations and other companies are actively manipulating the Web’s memory. They’re programming the Web to ‘remember’ stuff that might otherwise have become obscure by becoming harder to find. So if we are programming the Web to remember, should we also be programming it to forget - not by expunging information, but by encouraging certain information to drift, so to speak, to the back of the Web’s mind?”

You’ll note that there’s no mention of the killing of any old articles. In fact, in posing my final question, which is just a question, I specifically warn against expunging articles.

This has two benefits:
-original story is preserved, in all its wrongness.
-original story is updated, in situ
-web server will tell crawlers from search engines that there’s been an update on story, so indexes will get new correction
-stuff that points to the original story pointing out its wrongness now points to a story that admits its wrongness.

No need for fancy-schmancy spam-liable trackbacks or anything. Nor hard-to-define tags. (Does Judith Miller’s stuff now get tagged “misinformed” or “plain old wrong” or “thought it was right at the time”, which could apply to almost anything, including the weather forecast.)

Sometimes when you need to put a nail in, a hammer does it best - not a 5′x3′ Perkin-Elmer nail insertion platform with added bunnies. Which is what everyone seems to be suggesting.

Of course, it’s some way off your vision of a content map, Jeff: but I’m gradually abandoning my natural purism in favour of a ‘near enough is good enough’ strategy. A guaranteed 80% fit today is better than a potential 100% fit next year.