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

Really?

[voidptr]

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"?

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

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"?

Then there is the difference between "is credit with" and "is credited with". I wish Slashdot "editors" would call themselves Slashdot "reposters" or Slashdot "janitors", then I'd stop expecting them to grok basic grammar.

Re:Really?

[vrmlguy]

I break for braking news.

Re:Really?

[bidule]

English is a spoken language. There's no latin declension or other complications that forces you to think before you talk. Sadly, written English is a different dialect that many natives fail to master.

Whatever they write made sense to them because they read it back aloud. When you truly master reading, you never hear the words but directly capture their meaning from the shape of the letters. The effect of these misspellings are the same as a terrible foreign accent to the literate reader.

Re:Really?

[Unoriginal_Nickname]

The effect of these misspellings is the same as a terrible foreign accent to the literate reader.

You guys can...

[frozentier]

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.

Re:Stop the Presses!

[Crypto Gnome]

Braking News is what Rupert Murdoch and his multinational megacorp does, stopping it from being viewed online.

Worked great for Alta Vista

[fermion]

Recall that Google rose to power by not using the meta-tags to determine content, or importance, or any attributes. Alta Vista did do this, and fell because it was easy to spoof a meta-tag. By using graph theory they were able to make a search engine that was much more resilient to attacks.

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.

RDFa steamrollered by microformats then microdata

[spage]

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.

This is necessary why?

[notsoclever]

Whatever happened to the already-existing "cite" element and attribute that have been a standard part of HTML for years?

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

Implicitly allows inclusion

[mattr]

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.