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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."
Is there also a tag for the news source that properly edits it? The one, for example, that knows the difference between "brakes" and "breaks"?
This
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.
You guys can argue about "brake" and "break", I'm just trying to figure out WTF "snarky" means, and why anyone wanting to sound credible would even use it.
Braking News is what Rupert Murdoch and his multinational megacorp does, stopping it from being viewed online.
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I am not saying that there is clear case for profit via spoofing these tags, just that if there ever is profit to gain by rigging the tags, Google will be in no position to stop it. Therefore this move can be seen only as a method for Google to defend against those that says it profits from serving copyrighted content with a license. I do not see this as a problem other, except that it seem to a lot of work implementing something that probably solves nothing.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
RDFa is still around, there are a few sites that still use it, but my Firefox add-ons that would pull semantic data .from RDFa statements embedded in HTML are obsolete and gathering dust. Instead a lot of people put microformats into their HTML, especially hCard, because it's more HTML-like and less verbose. Google's Rich Snippets (starred reviews, etc.) will parse either form of structured data markup, but supposedly 94% of the info they parse is in microformat not RDFa. HTML5/WHATWG has a concept called microdata that seems to allow indicating the scope of microformat information, AIUI using new itemscope and itemprop attributes rather than overloading class attributes. But that seems to have no support for RDFa.
Google could parse a lot more structured data so we could tell them what the hell our web pages are about. I'm convinced the reason they don't do this is the most diligent users of ANY and ALL such techniques will be spammers and SEO bastards. This comment is really is about person:Angelina Jolie body_part:breasts last_updated:today!, despite all its links to cheap inkjet cartridges and online betting.
=S
Whatever happened to the already-existing "cite" element and attribute that have been a standard part of HTML for years?
There are 10 kinds of people: ones who understand ternary, ones who don't, and ones who think this joke is about binary
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.
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
Student: Is it true that the foundation of the universe is paradox?
Master: Well, yes and no.
I suppose what I'm frustrated by the most here is that an engineer behind the google news aggregation platform hasn't even look at what other ways to solve this problem are out there.
The link/@rel pattern fits this problem much better than a meta tag at the very least.
If you want to go a bit further; there are some fairly core vocabularies out there (DublinCore/PRISM) which describe a lot of what a document is and who authored it without much effort; and undoubtedly "googlenews:syndication-source" and "googlenews:original-source" could be put along side terms such as "owl:sameAs", "rdf:seeAlso", or "dc:source".
It's not like it takes much effort at all to render that; and it sure makes it easier for other platforms to extract useful content.
By tagging as first source, the publisher implicitly allows inclusion in a news search application. Using Google's tag means allowing specificially Google. Other news companies may not be in as good a position.
Google is also then free to copy text from any other source running the same story since the first source allows it.
Google no longer needs to try figure out which source was first.
And, Google now becomes non-evil and a champion for being precise about authorship, which reflects on its academic search application.
And, it makes it easy for Google to target independent journalists to hire in some way in the future. Perhaps it will start that project in Australia if Murdoch really gets them steamed.
English is my second language and while I do a lot of errors, they're different than the ones that natives do. My errors tend to be odd sentences (the structures used in English are very different than those used in my first language), odd expressions (Do I complete a quest or do I make a quest? Do I do an error or do I make an error? Or do I, perhaps, err? In my first language there isn't any difference so it's easy to make[?] those errors in English) and the like. However, I don't do errors such as break/brake, their/there, your/you're, it's/its (I do have some difficulties in remembering wierd/weird, though)... I think that there is a simple reason for this: I've had to study this stuff. I've had to study that You are can be shortened to You're and I am can be shortened to I'm. It would never cross my mind to mix You're and Your any more than I would mix I'm with in. I just don't see why I would ever do that.
If you're a native speaker, your teachers might assume that you know all that already and thus don't need to study the subjects in school. Even so, they could be taught the correct grammar quickly enough (No need to waste time studying sentence structures or vocalbulary... Most of the time could be used to weeding out those common errors) if the society would be interested in doing so. There is simply the question of "Why?". Why do you need to be 100% correct? Isn't it "good enough" to be understood? The answer: Not anymore.
You did compare English and latin. It is a very good comparison because English is the language of the world. People all around the world study English to communicate with each other... and nobody speaks it perfectly. The problem is that everyone makes different errors: The errors I do relate to my first language and I'm sure that everyone who has the same first language as I have can understand me perfectly. I'm also sure that someone who speaks perfect English would understand me quite well. Then, there is some guy in India whose errors relate to his first language. Others from India can understand his English, as can people who speak 100% perfect English... But if I were to discuss with him and we would both be doing different errors, would we understand each other? Maybe, maybe not. That being the case, it is important that everyone in the world does their best to speak 100% correct English. If you aim for "Good enough" you might no longer be able to communicate with someone who also aimed for "Good enough". Native speakers are not an exception here: They tend to make certaint errors due to the fact that english is their first language... And the errors that they make are different than those that everyone else in the world does.