The Register rabbits on (again) about the dangers of news.google.com using PR as a source of news.
The problem is not whether PR has news value. PR is just pre-packaged and ready for aggregation (a.k.a. 'publishing') by a news intermediary1. Information wants to be [re-]published.
The problem is really whose PR do you re-publish?
If you publish PR from company (or party) of size x, why not publish PR from those of size >x?
Lettice writes "you need to interface the automated system and the human judgment" and that "censorship has to be a basic component of the selection process".
Now this is just plain wrong. Why censor?
This is Google. They of the 10,000 server back-end (appropriately enough the story also talks about PR flacks having difficulty censoring company geeks). They of the mysterious (yet published) PageRank algorithm. A few simple (ahem) modifications and you could have your own biased outlook on the web.
This should be an exercise in hermeneutics, rather than hermits.
- Al
1 Why not dispense with the taxonomy of publisher, PR agency, news agency, broadcaster, aggregator, blog, et al? Any secondary source is an intermediary between a primary source and the end consumer (i.e. you! And you communicate with your friends, so you are an intermediary too, from their point of view). Envision endless chains of re-publication, eventually arriving at a consumer, only to be bounced further along to other consumers.
The primary source then becomes a special case of intermediary, with no input from other sources. All other intermediaries accept and re-distribute after applying idiosyncratic changes to the data.
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