You've seen it before, a news site like
Bloomberg partners with the
San Francisco Chronicle website called SFGate.com to share content. The result? The same blog post or article posted on both sites, and appearing on Google News.
No big deal, right? Good for both parties, right? Well, to the Google News team, that's a problem and they're working to change that via a new meta tag system.
This blogger thinks the
new meta tags system is one Google News should have left on the shelf.
Last week, Google News unveiled this experimental system with two types of meta tags: "syndication-source" and "original-source." In the first, publishers can pick
which one of two almost identical blog posts, columns, or articles can appear on Google News. In the second, Google wants news publishers to give credit to where the original story came from - the one that "broke the story." But stop right there. It's in the first case where Google's mistake is.
Where Google got the idea a publisher wanted to pick one of several identical posts that appear as the result of a content deal is not known. The idea of many content partnerships is to enjoy the traffic generating power of the content on more than one site, and with the assumption that both will appear on Google News.
If Google doesnt't want that, it will be the beginning of the end of Google' market share. In a tight economy, content sharing is more common than ever. To cause, say the SF Chronicle to lose revenue because of its relationship with Bloomberg, which is what could happen in this deal, is absurd. The end result is more akin to communism than capitalism.
Google must be careful not to try and control the market's behavior, but help it along. This blogger has the impression that Google feels it has to tinker in ways that make the overall web experience less enjoyable and less lucrative for small business in the media space.
If Google doesn't stop this course of action, it will see the growth of a competitor that will reduce its market share. Too often Google responds to the wrong voices in media, the voices of fear. These are the same voices that have not learned any of the New Media methods of writing for the Internet, and question the need to do so.
Some of those voices have also threatened to sue, or actually sued Google in the past, and unsuccessfully. In the vast majority of cases, their claims against Google were wrong. Google has to grow a pair and challenge these voices, not given in to them.
Which brings us to the second case. Determining the URL for an "original story" is an issue that can cause fist-fights. It's all too common for news sites representing established media organizations to take story ideas based on the work of bloggers, not source the blogger, but then want credit when the story is picked up elsewhere.
That has happened to a number of people, from myself with the creation of the term BeastWeek, to Richard Lieberman's local Bay Area media blog posts. If a blog is small, Google's not there to protect it, but if another blogger happens to expand on the story the bigger media organization put out, but got from the other small blogger without note, guess who Google comes after? The smaller blogger.
Google needs to rethink this idea. No, Google needs to trash it. It's too fraught with possibility for abuse.
Google must let the market work, not try to control it.
