Comments on: Contextualizing the news, especially when it’s wrong

By: David Weinberger

David Weinberger — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 15:44:34 +0000

fp, I fixed the link. Thanks.

By: fp

fp — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 00:14:23 +0000

(also, a search for “allen kraus new york times” pulls up Hoyt’s column, which is good since your link appears to be broken).

By: fp

fp — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 00:03:35 +0000

Pathetic. If a person needed the New York Times view on Enron, s/he could Google “enron new york times” and get all kinds of good stuff. If there is current news about the subject one can search Google via the “news” feature and I assume a New York Times article would appear near the top based on its currency. The NYT needs to drop the Search Engine Optimization BS and get back to its core competency, flogging Winer’s syndication schemas.

By: Jay Fienberg

Jay Fienberg — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 20:48:09 +0000

This issue seems practically ironic. Perhaps, more than anything, hypertext was invented to enable texts to be better contextualized, e.g., through linking in context, linking to context, etc.

While the NYT may choose to avoid (or, otherwise, fail to achieve) being literate in hypertext, if it’s going to put its work on the web and care about contextualizing that work, they’re going to have to move on from thinking about “what” and “how” and start thinking about “who,” “where” and “when.”

The “what” of the NYT on the web is the web / hypertext, and the “how” is more information / context rich pages with more information / context rich links. If the NYT embraced that and executed it well, they wouldn’t have their web-for-dummies questions about how the NYT appears in the Google web, because the NYT would web more than Google.

By: Hanan Cohen

Hanan Cohen — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 19:41:06 +0000

Do you remember the long bet between Dave Winer and Martin Nisenholtz? In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site. The URL of the bet is http://www.longbets.org/bet/2 The site is now unreachable.