Francis Hwang on Mon, 24 Mar 2003 12:45:21 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> Chuck0: Google News rejects Infoshop News; Indymedia and blogs next? |
You know, I really ought to learn to read better. Any non-cursory reading of Geert's forward would've indicated that, yes, these are two entirely distinct instances of Google P.R. issues. (I would gripe that Geert's forward didn't include any link for me to read further, but I'm afraid to admit that I'm actually that lazy.) Anyway. A little searching on that one search website that everybody uses but some of us are nervous about found me this page: http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=03/03/21/6866697. (I've always found those something-slash-something-slash-something story IDs to be totally inane: another crime against programming committed by the people at Slashdot, but I digress.) I don't know if this case is a big deal either. Basically it seems like the case of an Indymedia-style politicblog wanting to be indexed alongside professionally staffed pubs like the New York Times. Sure, we can argue that in these days of amateur online publishing that the difference between the pros and the amateurs is quickly disappearing blah blah blah. But the fact of the matter is that most people in this world (i.e. Google's target audience) still distinguish strongly between a paid reporter for the New York Times and some guy who lives in Brooklyn who's pissed at how the cops treated him at the last protest. More fruitful, I think, would be to beat the drums loudly for the rising blogosphere, and ways that non-obsessives can start following along with this sort of chatter. Me, I used Blogdex for a while (http://blogdex.media.mit.edu), which counts links across the blogosphere and then tells you the most popular. These days, most of these links are straight war stories, of course, but there's also the Gulf War Drinking Game, and some guy in the National Guard who had his name legally changed to "Optimus Prime". Roll out! Blogdex isn't the only blog-aggregating service out there: There are lots of different approaches, all imperfect. The main problem with Blogdex is that one story can show up in the same form at ten different sites, each being heavily linked to. When the bombing started, for example, the front page was flooded with different stories on it, though they were all pretty much saying the same thing. More sophisticated aggregation would be great, to help truly novel stories stand out, but it would take some seriously heavy lifting to pull that stuff off. Hey, wait a sec, didn't Google just buy Blogger? Goodness. Be careful what you wish for. F. ----- End forwarded message ----- # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net