The (old) Licquia Family Blog

This is the old blog site, powered by a simple blogging system called Blosxom. It's here to keep old links from breaking, and for whatever historic interest might remain.

Here's the current site.



Sun, 18 May 2003

The NY Times censors itself

As usual, the blogger world takes the ball dropped by the media and runs with it, must faster than the media itself can. I was going to follow up to this, but the rest of the blog world beat me to it. And, since I don't have much to add, I'll make this linkfest my followup.

An excellent post by the PuddingTime blog takes on the accountability issue much better than Thompson did. How does the blog world handle corrections? Right now, not too well. They're either made as comments to the main story, as edits to the main story, or in a new blog entry. None of these are very good ways to get the word out. Read the full post for details.

Doc's reply (and his additional clarification) are devastating:

Here's a thought. What would happen if the archives of all the print publications out there were open to the Web, linkable by anybody, and crawlable by Google's bots? Would the density of blogs "above the fold" (on page one) of Google searches go down while hard copy sources go up? I'll betcha it would.

He calls this "printwash" in contrast to Orlowski's "googlewash" term. Basically, professional news sites don't play the Web game like everyone else does, and are suddenly surprised that they don't define the Web conversation like they think they should. Newspaper columnists are being locked out of the debate by the policies of their own newspapers, not by the machinations of a "blog cabal".

Now, in all fairness, the pro sites have a problem they're trying to solve: how to make money on the Web. Locking up their archives is one way to do this. This does have the effect of reducing their influence in the blog world, but that's a tradeoff decision they have to make. But I do agree with Doc that they shouldn't then complain about their declining influence.

(The previous link itself provides a good example of what Doc's talking about. Can you read it now? Without registering? Or has it been a few weeks? It's awfully easy to argue with someone who won't let anyone read his answers.)

The best quote out there is from Larry Lessig. If you don't read his site, you really should; Lessig is one of the most important participants in the digital rights arena. Anyway, he says:

This Internet is getting out of control. I just learned that when you search on news in Google, for example, it actually returns results with the work of people, not Incs. This has got to be stopped. Get Google to change its code. Incs. before people. Always.

Brilliant.

May 18, 2003 | Comments are no longer available