Status-Q

Podcasts are becoming more and more important to me. Every day, while shaving or dressing, I get to listen to about 20 mins of interesting, educational stuff, usually talks from conferences that I didn’t get to attend. Now I can ‘attend’ them without any cost in money or time! If I had a daily commute to work, it would be even more valuable.

I’ve always been a big fan of radio. The quality of radio & TV broadcasting here is one of the few things about Britain that still makes me proud of my country. The more I travel, the more I realise that our publicly-funded BBC really is the best in the world. And I’m ever more aware that, despite this, its days in its current form are numbered.

But if I, as an enthusiastic supporter of radio in Britain, find myself spending more time listening to podcasts than the radio, no wonder it’s taking off at such a rate in the rest of the world! I don’t expect, for example, when I turn on the radio, to hear any commercials, but for most of the world the simple matter of podcasts being largely advertisement-free is probably enough of an incentive in itself.

My good friend Dale made what I think is an exceedingly interesting discovery. Let me quote a bit of his email:

For reasons related to a joke, I did a search on Halliburton in Google. Got the following response:

Halliburton

Home page of Halliburton with links to many newspaper articles rebutting critics’ allegations of improper conduct.
www.halliburton.com/ – 17k – Cached – Similar pages

Okay. But, I don’t see that text in the page. Nor in the page source. This description, with a prominent mention of rebuttal of improper conduct, doesn’t seem to be in either the current page or the cached page. So who came up with this description? Google?

No, DMOZ.
See
http://dmoz.org/Society/Issues/Business/Allegedly_Unethical_Firms/ Halliburton/Opposing_Views/.

So the description comes from the open directory project. An entry quite deep, and in an dissenting view. Could just anyone become a volunteer editor for certain categories and modify the entries of major websites to be whatever they wanted? Why should Google or I trust this?

Or am I missing something?

A very good question – thoughts anyone? Is this just somebody at Google being mischievous? Dale later pointed out that the same is true of IBM. Google’s description of their home page is taken from here, and while that description’s uncontraversial, it does raise the same question…

Update: What’s more, it happens even on important sites! Google’s description of Status-Q also comes from DMoz. I think I submitted this entry, back in the days when the weblogs section had a couple of dozen entries!

The general problem here, I guess, is to decide whether the owner of a site gives a more balanced description of it than the editors of some moderated third-party site. Perhaps it’s not such a bad practice after all. Unless you’re Halliburton.