Taylor Momsen Did Not Write This Slashdot Headline 192
Hugh Pickens writes "David Carr writes that headlines in newspapers and magazines were once written with readers in mind, to be clever or catchy or evocative, but now headlines are just there to get the search engines to notice. Hence the headline for this story that includes a prized key word for one of the 'Gossip Girls' — just the thing to push this Slashdot summary to the top of Google rankings. 'All of the things that make headlines meaningful in print — photographs, placement, and context — are nowhere in sight on the Web,' writes Carr. Headlines have become, as Gabriel Snyder, the recently appointed executive editor of Newsweek.com, says, 'naked little creatures that have to go out into the world to stand and fight on their own.' In this context, 'Jon Stewart Slams Glenn Beck' is the ideal headline, guaranteed to pull in thousands of pageviews. And while nobody is suggesting that the Web should somehow accommodate the glories of The New York Post's headlines in that paper's prime, some of its classics would still work. 'Remember "Headless Body in Topless Bar," perhaps the most memorable New York Post headline ever? It's direct, it's descriptive, and it's oh-so-search-engine-friendly. And not a Taylor Momsen in sight.'"
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Informative)
Bad form replying to my own response, according to some on here (to you I say FEH. FEH I SAY!), but apparently Taylor Momsen is a young (born in July, 1993) American actress.
Dang, that's the year I graduated high school....17 years has passed? Really? Damn.
Get off my...well, it's not old and crusty, but it's still my lawn. So get off it, you damned kids.
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
*laugh* I'm sorry, but you can't use "Slashdot" and "street-cred" in the same sentence like that.
Geek-cred? Maybe. Street-cred? I don't think so.
Re:Golden Girls! (Score:4, Informative)
This goes along with ... (Score:3, Informative)
Lately I've been noticing that I get a lot more google matches that are utterly irrelevant to what I was looking for, and on examination, they usually don't even contain any of the keywords that I typed. This is presumably part of the same problem, due to the growing success of marketers in "attracting eyes" by tricking the search sites into sending people to the marketers' sites.
Perhaps a useful approach would be for the search sites to allow us to "ban" a site, similarly to what a lot of email and news readers have done for years. This could be done in a browser, of course, but it should work even better if the search site got the information. They could then use readers' banning as part of the ranking, because they'd know that a site is not a good match for someone looking for keywords X, Y and Z, despite what it may look like to the search bot.
Another approach might be to see if the courts would go along with applying "truth in advertising" laws to stuff online. You'd think this would be obvious, but we're still in the stage at which the inclusion of words like "computer" or "online" immediately cancels all precedent, and centuries of lessons must be relearned for the new computer/network environment. It's probably still some years before false advertising online can be challenged and prosecuted as easily as with false and misleading print or broadcast ads.
Re:A-freaking-men! (Score:3, Informative)
Actually I hadn't noticed that at all. So, I decided to do 5 seconds worth of research on your claim. I discovered that of the 10 headlines which drop down from my Reuters RSS bookmark thing in Firefox, precisely 1 is about the oil spill. I can't imagine that 9 other newsworthy things might be happening in the entire world, so you're probably right that this whole oil spill thing is being swept under the rug by getting only 1/9th the exposure of everything else combined.
Oh, mind that none of the sarcasm drips on your shoes... it stains.