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?

[Unoriginal_Nickname]

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

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.

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