A blog post’s shelf life; when will search engines let it go?
Last night I attended a panel discussion, hosted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on the legal issues surrounding blogs. EEF is an organization that was created to protect individual’s digital rights online. In doing so, they have created a nifty Legal Guide For Bloggers to help individual’s understand their rights. I would assume that many of us don’t know them and they could change over time. Among those on the stage (as seen above from left to right) were Kurt Opsahl, moderator and leader of EEF’s bloggers’ rights campaign; Jackson West of SFist; Violet Blue of Fleshbot (Not Suitable For Work); Dan Gillmor of Bayosphere; Danah Boyd of Zephoria, Misbehaving.net, and Many to Many; and Mary Hodder of Napsterization - a nice blend of bloggers.
There were key points from the discussions on the panel that I plan to cover over the course of the week. There is one that I wanted to address first. What is the shelf life of a blog post? Will a bad post come back to haunt you 10 years down the road? More importantly, is this fair to that person or company? What are the implications for personal privacy? Should we be granted rights to determine when these posts will be removed? How will this issue be resolved and when will search engines let these posts go?
Picture this. Hypothetically, let’s say that I have a blog that I use to communicate with family members. Through this blog, I express my feelings about a recent run-in with the law. Little did I know, people outside of my family read this blog, as blogs are open to the public. My little run-in with the law was picked up and blogged throughout the blogosphere. Now for the rest of my Google/Yahoo/MSN search engine life, whenever you type in “My Name” and “(Whatever Law I Broke)”, my reputation will be tarnished. What if my potential future employer types in these key terms? Is this fair to me? By conventional law my run-in would be erased over some period of time, but with the strength of search engines, it may stick with me for the rest of my life. Sure, I should have obeyed the law in the first place and thought twice about blogging my run-in with the authorities. But what if someone found out about my run-in with the law and decided to blog about it without my consent? Is this a violation of my privacy? Are there consequences for people who do this? Should there be?
Dan Gillmor, sitting calmly on the panel, said, “I look forward to the day we elect a President who has had a blog.” Published blog content about you, your company, or whomever - will stick with you forever. Steve Rubel pointed me to his recent comments in a podcast with John Furrier, “Never send an email to a blogger that you wouldn’t want stamped on your forehead for the rest of your life because a blogger can do copy-paste-publish with your email and that stuff shows up in Google. You go to get a job, you go to get a girlfriend, whatever, so you need to take the care.”
Clearly, we are moving into an era where Internet users are not just reading what’s on the Web, we’re also writing it – due to the new blogging medium. Search tools are becoming more powerful and with the increase of bloggers, content of all kinds are being published throughout the Web - both positive and negative. Since blogs are open to the public, we should assume that anyone can find and read it, but the underlining issue is: How long are these posts going to stick around and should we be granted rights to determine when they will be removed? Then, who should be responsible for making this decision and who would manage the technology?
Update: Hat tip to Tom for linking to this blog - check out his take on this same issue.
Next up: Blogging at work. As PR people, we are expected to keep up with this new medium, but who has time? What are our rights as bloggers and should we tell your boss about our blog? Are we free to blog about whatever we want? What if our work sees it?
posted by Blake at 10:50 AM
7 Comments:
Could one argue that Google is Big Brother from the book, 1984?
1:11 PM
Well, it's odd because some things that I have written are no longer on the Web (or, at least not via Google). So, I guess some things do eventually disappear.
2:26 PM
Blake, there's nothing special in the issues you raise about blogging versus posting anything on the internet in any way. If you publish it to the web -- without some type of password protection -- the search engines may naturally pick the content up.
That's what search engines do. That's how they operate. They crawl everything and have done for the past 10 years.
Did search engines violate your privacy by finding your content? No, not by a long shot. You violate your own privacy by publishing in the first place. If you never meant for people to know about your in-law squabble, then it should not have been on the web in the first place.
That's a key education I guess some people new to web publishing need to understand. Anything you put out there will be seen by others potentially, unless you establish strict controls. So think about what you publish. This has been the case before blogs were popular, and it remains so.
As for search memory, you can expect that if you pull a post down, it will disappear from the major search engines between a day to maybe a month or so. But if you publish, other players outside the majors might archive your content and display it for some time. That's especially so if you do a full-text feed broadcast of your posts. If you send them out there, they ain't coming back.
In short, the privacy issues you raise aren't new. Not by a long shot. http://searchenginewatch.com/resources/article.php/2156541#Privacy at my web site gives you examples of this over time. While mechanisms like robots.txt will help you block content from being indexed by some search engines, that won't prevent others from reading it. In short, saying you have some right to have a post removed is like saying a newspaper has a right to get back al l the copies of a particular issue it puts out that may have an error on it. You simply can't do it, not if you published it widely in the first place. And that's exactly what happens when you put things on the web. You publish widely, whether you intended to or not.
6:39 PM
The point I am trying to make in this post is that if someone publishes negative content about you without your consent, is it fair that for every time you’re looked up in a search engine, that person will be reminded of what was said about you?
With this in mind, there are so many people blogging all kinds of content – both good and bad. You don't need to be a journalist to have work published on the Web anymore. With blogging technology, anyone can publish anything at anytime, without consent from which who they are talking about. And it’s so easy to do. Therefore, if a negative post is published about you, it can haunt you later on down the road. All you have to do is type in a name and everything that’s ever been said about that person in the Web magically appears - in seconds.
Gathering newspaper content that was published 20 years ago is not an easy process – it probably takes hours (who has that kind of time) so there is no major concern to retract the clippings. But with strength of search engines, the power to pull up information is much easier and much faster.
My question is how long will a link to to a negative post stay up? Do you always want to be reminded of a negative post someone wrote about you 20 years ago everytime you type your name into Google?
10:43 PM
Everything you do on the Internet - from responses to blog posts to IM conversations to emails to pictures on Flickr - you should assume will be with you and available to anyone with a search engine and itchy finger on the keyboard for the rest of your life.
Some people who are new to the Internet and online communications might find this surprising but there's no such thing as a shelf-life where the Web is concerned.
Danny is right, it's not the search engines violating your privacy - in fact you should never assume anything you do on the Internet has any degree of privacy.
4:53 AM
Here is another thought: It's one of our duties as PR people to maintain and build a positive reputation both for ourselves and for our clients. If someone slams us in a print publication, it's bad, but it will either get thrown away or stuffed in the archives room in the basement. If someone gets slammed on the Web, we will be reminded of this every time we enter their/or our name in a search engine - forever. There's nothing we can do to control that. As PR people, shouldn't that concern us?
11:15 AM
Blake - you've stumbled onto the most important point ... the fact that Google means Forever should keep PR people up at night.
Unfortunately most PR people haven't figured that one out. They still pretend that print matters and online and blogs are an afterthought.
I know companies where the number 3 or 4 hit on Google is a slam on a blog and the PR team pretends it's not relevent. That's not going to cut it in the new PR.
If you can't deal with the online media world, you won't last much longer in PR.
12:20 PM
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