To be honest, most of the information that passes through our mammoth news hydrant is disposable and ultimately unimportant. However, it remains searchable, and that could be a problem if we aren’t a little smarter about how we communicate online.
I won’t use any names, but within the last 48 hours there has been a rather large online effort to locate a missing teenage girl. Her father has a rather large network on Twitter, and the word spread quickly and rapidly. Bloggers wrote entries asking for help in finding her. It was the power of Social Media in action.
Permanent Record
She was found and is okay, but what to do with all of that internet debris? While this young woman will want to put this embarassing episode behind her, will she be able to run away from the negative effect of having her name published across the internet? Already, responsible marketers like BL Ochman are taking down their entries, but how many will not? And more importantly, is there a way to extract all that “Google Juice” back? Is there a protocol to clear out the cached entries?
It would be simple to say that given enough time, this incident will fall off the first page of Google searches. But what will happen when the next generation of search algorithms starts digging out the deep stuff? Employers looking for dirt on potential hires do dig deeper, and eventually will have smarter searches to look for anything involving police or investigators and bring them to the top.
Also, is it fair for us to make it incumbent upon a teenage girl to somehow generate enough “positive news” about herself so as to eventually “drown out” an embarassing event in her life?
Disposable Posts
Maybe it’s time we create a new tag, microformat, or classification for certain types of information. Use it for things that we want the search engines to find today, but we may want them to “forget” later. You can already put in code on certain pages that tells search engines not to index, so why not something that says “Index this, until I you encounter a revocation code — then yank ALL the old pages out of the index.”
The might be some potential abuses of such a technology. Maybe if it was visibly flagged, so there would be no surprise. A “Creative Commons” style license, that indicates “This page may be considered TEMPORARY.” That way you could just the merits of the information with the appropriate degree of skepticism. And we could use these awesome publishing tools to do some amazing short-term good with minimal long-term side-effects for those who don’t deserve a mark on their permanent records.
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, information, google, search, communication, emergency communication[/tags]
