Google's New Meta-Tags For News Story Authors 71
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."
Re:You guys can... (Score:2, Informative)
Age isn't everything. The word cunt has been around for over half a millennium, that doesn't make it any more credible for use. "Snarky" is like the word "cute" - you may find it in an Op-Ed, but the front page article sure as hell won't be using it.
Worked great for Alta Vista (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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 [microformats.org] into their HTML, especially hCard, because it's more HTML-like and less verbose. Google's Rich Snippets [blogspot.com] (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 [w3.org] 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.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
The effect of these misspellings is the same as a terrible foreign accent to the literate reader.
Re:RDFa steamrollered by microformats then microda (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Lack of practice (Score:3, Informative)
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.
I would. I see these errors in my first language (Dutch - e.g. "eens" or "'ns" becomes "is" what you see mostly by younger people), so this could be a universal type of language error. "You're" and "your" are pronounced the same, and many people mess this up. The last ten years I've become more and more aware of this, as I've joined many online forums, where many people don't have the grammar and spelling level that I was used to (from news papers, magazines, books etc). At first I found it very annoying, and then I got Mono/Pfeiffer, and suddenly began to make those errors myself. And it never stopped. So it could happen to you as well, because of some illness that burns you out, or just because you get older and are not that fit anymore. So it's not a matter of choice, it can just happen. (And this text is probably spelled correctly, because I'm very keen on it, but it could have several errors in it that I will only see if I read it later today!)
Re:Really? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Lack of practice (Score:1, Informative)
It's definitely A LOT harder for me (non native english speaker) to understand sentences written with weird grammar. Maybe I write with weird grammar too, my problem is that I have no practice writing and always think about my first language's grammar. Then I make a strange mix of my other language's grammar with english and my sentences become strange... Nevertheless, I agree with the "Lack of practice" post. On a side note, one of my professors went to India once and couldn't understand a word of what indians said in a conference (in english), and she's polish (different first language) so maybe the first poster has a point.