Friday, September 28, 2007

Why We Are Different

One of the obligations of a blog or blogger who wants to be taken seriously is to admit mistakes without being asked. A few days ago, we had a link to the Aspen Daily News go bad. We assumed, incorrectly, it now seems, that it was done maliciously.

It turns out that the newspaper has a routine practice of moving items to its archives and assigning a new url. One of the essays on the subject was "Liberals are Dumb as Dirt, Sometimes." That title seems doubly appropriate in this internet age. What if everyone changed url's quickly after publishing them the first time? Google would either double in value or go broke, and we're not sure which.

Note that ProgressNowAction, aka PlagiarismNowAction and Colorado Media Matters would never consider publishing something like this. Does that make us better than them? Maybe not, but it makes us different.

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