Google's New Meta-Tags For News Story Authors

EreIamJH writes "Google News is experimenting with meta-tags in an effort to ensure that the correct news source is credited with an article. The original-source meta-tag will identify the newspaper that breaks a story, while syndication-source is for everyone who repeats the story. Both meta-tags can appear multiple times — for instance an article that sources information from other articles would include an original-source tag for each article used in preparing the new article. While the intention is worthy, I look forward to lots of snarky blogger fights as journalists vent their hurt feelings for having been omitted as an original source."

Comments

Where's the RDFa?

[TwistedPants]

One google team is pushing it; but these guys have missed a chance to implement it properly by only the barest of margins. RDFa would be a perfect solution for this.

Re:not hurt feelings, but pay check

[martin-boundary]

I don't think google is looking to give authors credit per se. Who the actual author is and whether he gets famous or receives money from being quoted/copied is frankly irrelevant.

What matters to search engines is if a particular story is "popular", because popularity means that a random web surfer is statistically likely to want to hear about it.

The technical problem is how to compare two stories which have obviously similar content, because otherwise the popularity counts could be off. That's not trivial to get 100% right, for example if in two texts, a single sentence is changed, does that mean that the second text is a modification of the first (and should be considered the same popularitywise) or is the second a completely new story because the extra sentence is important breaking news?

If you can point to the "sources", then you have that much more information to group stories by topic, and measure popularity. You can also do lots of other datamining for things like bias etc.

Of course, that's only in theory. In practice, it's certainly a new toy for spammers.

What's the incentive?

[S77IM]

News sites are suddenly going to get really diligent about citing sources? What would motivate them to do that, when they can't get basic facts straight or use a fucking grammar checker? I thought Cory Doctorow laid it out pretty clearly in Metacrap.

  -- 77IM