28th
Lazy Saturday Activity: Plowing Through Four Months Of Unread Google Reader
Are you using Google Reader? No? What’s that?
In my opinion, it’s the furtive steps toward the future of news. It’s a way to organize the vast content of the Internet in a relatively easy format. What if a newspaper had an unlimited number of contributors that wrote about exactly the topics you cared about and was updated in real time? That’s Google Reader.
I got a new laptop this month after my previous laptop was damaged in an accident in February, so I’ve finally been able to catch up on all the articles, blog posts and Web entries I’ve missed.
Here’s a good one from JD Lassica’s Social Media blog about how “the Internet never forgets” — and what that means for the media in terms of responsibility. I agree wholeheartedly that reporters have an obligation to update their stories for the Web, especially when the courts are involved. Reputations for both journalists and their sources are at stake. Once something is posted online, it’s extremely hard to delete it. Even if you do remove the content, if it’s been picked up by Web crawlers, it’s cached. And that doesn’t even take into account that many sites don’t want you to be able to delete your content.
Are reporters and editors keeping this stuff in mind? I doubt many are.
