March 11th, 2007
Blog Herald Column: Do Online Publishers Do Enough To Correct Inaccuracies?
In traditional newspaper publishing, errors are typically corrected the next day, in small print, in a small section inside the paper that lists such errors. Most bloggers have adopted the convention of the “update,†with has many similarities to the print publisher approach. An update is typically an addendum placed at the end of the original post that lists any new information, including corrections. But the original post, including the title, typically remains unchanged.
In an online world driven by search engines that create permanent — and easy to find — records of every inaccuracy, is this practice sufficient?
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Readers should cut both bloggers and publishers a break sometimes…
Scott Karp / Publishing 2.0 : Blog Herald Column: Do Online Publishers Do Enough To Correct Inaccuracies?
An addendum to the original is exactly the right way to handle it.
In the online world, anything you’ve written could be aggregated, quoted and excerpted all over the internet. Your mistake will be preserved in forms you cannot alter. Your correction should acknowledge the existence of the original error, and present the correct information. That way you don’t appear to be trying to hide anything, and if someone searches for the original based on quoted material, they can find your correction.
Erasing or changing your original data just sets the original lose on the internet in quotes and copies, reducing the likelihood someone will see bad information, not reducing it.
When I was researching a trip to Ecuador, I came across a Travel 2.0 company who are using their online community to help keep their guidebooks up to date, in a way that as far as I can see, no other company is. The website is http://www.vivatravelguides.com. This goes some way towards rectifying the age-old problem with the traditional guidebook: namely, the fact that it is out of date very quickly.