There's been quite a stir on the SIG-IA email list recently about Google's new and their flippant "No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page" (now removed). Peter Morville, of Semantic Studios and polar bear book fame has commented on this over on O'Reilly:

Google's claim that it offers "a news service compiled solely by computer algorithms without human intervention" is misleading, at best. What about the programmers who wrote the algorithms? What about the designers and architects who structured and organized the templates? What about the thousands of reporters and editors who wrote and selected the articles?

That this has hit such a nerve makes me wonder if journalists suffer from the same insecurity I attribute to technical writers: when you make your living from writing, you can worry that you aren't valued because this is something that people learn when they are in first grade. Never mind that writing for understanding is something that most never pick up ... in high school, college, or elsewhere ... but still, our colleagues and bosses are still willing to let the new admin write the reports or the engineers write the documentation.

Peter's article preaches to the choir -- to those who already get it. The real question is how to get the same message to those who don't?

12:51 PM | linkme | home