a Will of Rights Online (followup to Slate piece)

After my investigation into Search Engine Obfuscation-- the case of the Times's pages on Allen Kraus dwarfing the search rankings on Google-- I emailed a number of the bloggers who'd written about it last week. The response was underwhelming. (Begging the Times to start a blog back in 2003, Dave Winer had explained: "In the weblog world we don't string together soundbites to create a 'story' -- we continually cover an area, and comment on developments over time." In theory, yes...)

The one non-blogger I wrote, Jack Shafer of Slate, kindly took notice: "Garfunkel's success at remaking Kraus' Google image so quickly with such little effort supports my original view that the alleged problem is de minimis."

The success was all luck. I never would have heard about it if he hadn't complained to the Times and Clark Hoyt hadn't listened, and if Seth Finkelstein didn't bring it to my attention for a third time. And consider the thousands of people, who came across this story and didn't know how to remedy it. Somehow I convinced Seth and another blogger to give Kraus a link. I was in a car accident this past Monday and walked away from it (even drove away). Just think, if Interstate-91 had been a bit busier, I might not have been in condition to update Jack on the story. You at least have redundancy on the iPhone hacking front.

What I really wanted to do is to start a conversation about online publishers, search engines, and social responsibility. Such a conversation did materialize over the last few days, but it's coalesced around a Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web -- which followed on the heels of a Facebook announcement (and subsequent buzz) about opening profiles to Google, and in advance of the Data Sharing Summit. (The Facebook "news" is a bit artificial, as Danny Sullivan explains.)

But other concerns deserve to be in such a "bill of rights." How about setting a standard vocabulary for comment management? (see CommResp) How about reporting online harassment-- and getting slander erased from search engines? (see PONAR) These are bigger issues than Jack Shafer could tackle in a single follow-up column. Somehow I'm still trying to will this conversation into being. And until these are encoded into bills of rights, they remain mere wills of rights.

Update, Friday afternoon: I suppose I shouldn't take the social web's lack of interest to heart here. Eszter Hargittai has written a book chapter for the forthcoming book The Hyperlinked Society: The Role of Expertise in Navigating Links of Influence, covering much the same ground.