Cervical cancer vaccine, online news, Google and SEO October 2, 2009
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : Journalism, SEO, linking, science , add a commentSEO expert Malcolm Coles kicked off an interesting experiment yesterday, to shift the emphasis in Google’s search results away from “negative and inaccurate information” (eg some news stories) linking a girl’s death to the cervical cancer vaccine and towards NHS pages about the vaccine.
More by Malcolm here about the tendency of some news stories to suggest (or make) a connection between the death and the vaccine.
He has been encouraging bloggers and others to publish web links, with relevant linked text, to influence Google’s search results, such as cervical cancer jab, cervical cancer vaccine, and cervical cancer vaccine Q&A.
So far, the NHS seems to have bought ’sponsored links’ against some search key words, but I don’t see any of the NHS sites in the first page of Google’s search results for “cervical cancer jab”, which continues to be dominated by news stories.
Four legal dangers of links in articles and blogs — Sarah Hartley October 14, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentSummary of points from legal briefing, relayed by Sarah Hartley of MEN. Perhaps on the precautionary and technical end of the spectrum? (Fair enough.) She says in response to a comment: “It seems no org has yet been to court to make case law – stuff is being settled out of court.”
The four points boil down to:
“* A linking convention of opening in a new window will not save us if we do link to something defamatory or otherwise unlawful.
* Linking to a foreign site or article could lead to a contravention of a British court order.
* Never link into the archive for active cases.
* Be aware that the material being linked to could change from something safe to something less savoury.”
Will Algorithms Make Human Editors Obsolete? Not If Journalists Collaborate – Publishing 2.0 October 13, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentScott Karp makes his case for more collaboration. My query: what happens to competition and to the revenue side of the equation?
"…while algorithms may excel at processing vast amounts of data by brute force, they are only as smart as the rules we give them. Algorithms can simulate human intelligence — but algorithms have no judgment — and certainly no news judgment. Algorithms can’t do link journalism. […]
Imagine if journalists and news orgs brought together their combined editorial intelligence, their combined news judgment.
Suddenly the advantage of an algorithm’s scale in filtering the web doesn’t seem so insurmountable. […]
…the idea that news orgs can accomplish more together than they can by themselves isn’t so foreign to journalism — it’s the basis of the newswire. So it’s not that hard to imagine a collaborative newswire based on links, where journalists help each other filter the web."