This post just floored me, and I’m upset it took me *this* long to get around to it!

I couldn’t agree more with how vital this is, the need for a techno gew-gaw to remove expired/fatuous/defamatory postings. In fact, I’m the direct (and sadly much too experienced!) victim of this sort of articular caching, and it’s perhaps less severe in my case since the claptrap being posted isn’t in English, thank the Higher Power!

When I’d politely asked the editor on three separate occasions to yank the posts (once directly, by phone), or at least to remove my tri-monikered attribution from the now-defunct organization about which the article was initially penned — the editor flatly refused.

You might be interested in this little bit of business I caught the other day by podcast at BBC’s Monday Documentary, a propos to what you’re talking about:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/documentaries/2008/10/081029_caucases_doc.shtml

It’s the Web 2.0 version of the story appearing on page one, but the correction being on page 12.

There must be a way to deal with this…

I’m not sure how you get rid of things once they are cached. I have no idea how to do such with Twitter or the like. It’s something which we all should be thinking about.

I have never had much use for FB because of this, and use other services of the type on a very limited basis.

Your question is a fair one. Do I want PR firms engaging in this as a regular tactic? No. That’s why it should come with a big, fat, public stamp that indicates it could be pulled from all archives.

While some bloggers do indeed aspire to be considered “citizen journalists,” I would posit that many well-meaning bloggers and Twitterati who helped publicize the disappearance would like for a clean way to yank it from the cyber-record. Maybe it’s still fresh enough you can extract it. Maybe not.

Heck, even the “Recall this Message” feature in Outlook only works 60% of the time.

Thanks for joining the discussion. And we do agree, the vast majority of information online deserves to stay there — but can we come up with a clean solution for instances like this one that can harm down the road?

It is probably not journalistically correct to take down the posts, but it is ethically and humanly correct IMO, and that’s why I did it.

I am sorry for the young woman and the turmoil she and her family have obviously experienced. It was a value judgment on my part to take the post down and I think a lot of other bloggers may follow.

BUT, there are too many ways to abuse posts marked “disposable” or temporary.

And the way life is, there are consequences for our actions.

Nobody trusts corporations or PR firms now. Believe me, giving them the opportunity to disappear news would not help anything.

That’s why I wouldn’t mind some type of common, recognized and visible flag that says “This Page is subject to search-engine elimination.” One could then assume that anything without it was meant to be more “permanent.”

Just editing the pages doesn’t do anything about clearing Google’s cached archives.

I don’t have a good answer about the Twitter-effect.

@Deb –

If PR firms are posting information that is flagged as “disposable,” then you shouldn’t give it much stock. (Unless it is precisely the sort of information I describe above, which wouldn’t likely be on a corporate site anyway.)

As to the recent stock debacles, you mention a couple of cases where the existence of the archives actually helped. There was a way to compare the supposedly “new” information with the old, make a match, and debunk the new posting.

By all means, it’s not a perfect system. As Shannon points out, there are some existing protocols that might help, but they are beyond the ability of the average user and are not as transparent as we might like.

If there is the existence of a “magic key” that can yank a page out of history, those reading it today deserve to know about it.

[meta http-equiv="expires" content="Wed, 26 Feb 1997 08:21:57 GMT"]

Could the search engines honor these expirations — and could we avoid their use just to clear the browser cache? What do we do about pages (like Twitter) on which we have no control? I think the tools are there if we use them properly, but as you know that’s much easier said than done.