Brad Burnham recently wrote a post on the editorial process on the web, where the work happens after the publish button is pushed, not before it. It’s a report on a forum session and you can read some stakeholders opinions in the post. There are a serie of good points in the post and comments but, imho, there are also some questions left unanswered.

Basically, blog posts are edited after their publication: if I wrote something wrong, people will tend to post comments correcting what is wrong. That’s why Robert Scoble doesn’t agree with Andrew Keen when the latter argued that “the recent rise of user generated content is lowering the overall quality of programming on the web”. I think there is a “population effect”: the more visitors you have, the more edition and discussions you can have.

Now I would like to know if and how people edit their original posts after getting new input and/or corrections. I try to add a note at the bottom clearly stating the edition. What if I don’t do that? Content will vary over time. How can you trust such content? Since RSS feeds are not reflecting those changes, people using RSS are not aware of these changes. As stated in the post I was referring to, people need new tools to continuously assess the relevance of information they read on the internet (it was already the case with static content but this need becomes more urgent as dynamic content are more easily created and modified). Or bloggers must endorse “rules of conduct” not to edit posts but in this case, it’s up to the visitor to read comments and to summarize what should be the truth out of all this.

I think we are all used to the traditional media editing process: once it’s written, it should be right or corrected in the next publication (by the way the process is mutatis mutandis the same in mainstream media as well as in the scientific literature). Ditto for television where once it’s aired, it should be either correct or later corrected. The main difference is that blog posts and dynamic content in general are there at an instant i and stay during a certain duration (delta-i) in an unmodified form OR in a modified form. If you read the same popular page of the wikipedia (or any other wiki, e.g.) everyday, you’ll never read twice the same information (but main facts will still remain the same).

Finally, unlike Brad Burnham and people who wrote comments on his post, I don’t consider this “post publishing edition” as a problem for decision making (would it be at the business, personal or scientific level). Fact-checking and multiple sources of information are not yet obsolete.

(This post will be in French since it concerns French and French-speaking Belgians and gives links to websites written in French)

Les élections françaises approchant (c’est demain !), un certain nombre de personnes ont émis de vifs doutes sur le vote électronique, doutes relayés par la presse (exemple). Je voulais juste épingler le blog de Laurent Pieuchot, conseiller municipal d’Issy-les-Moulineaux (près de Paris, en France). Il y décrit les cafouillages, gaffes, incertitudes et autres mensonges à propos du vote électronique et des ordinateurs de vote dans plusieurs communes françaises. Et ils vont voter pour la plus haute fonction de l’État français …

Quelques liens intéressants sont également répertoriés, comme ordinateurs-de-vote.org, un site web regroupant “citoyens et informaticiens pour un vote vérifié par l’électeur”. Ou encore la section vote électronique du blog de François Nonnenmacher (un consultant informatique), recensant les dernières nouvelles françaises sur le sujet (il y en a qui sont édifiantes !). Pour se rendre compte plus pratiquement des problèmes posés par le vote électronique, une machine à voter virtuelle va vous montrer qu’un ensemble de votes peut être falsifié tout en présentant les apparences de sécurité, vérification (vérifiabilité ?), agrément, certification, etc. (lisez la foire aux questions par après pour voir si vos doutes peuvent être levés ou vos certitudes ébranlées).

Finalement, pour les belges, si vous pensez que vous êtes à l’abri de ce genre d’histoire, vous pouvez vous rendre sur le site pour Eva. Vous verrez que même Eva n’est pas très sure que son vote électronique soit correctement pris en compte en Belgique (je sais le jeu de mot est facile).

The Belgian Justice confirmed its original judgement by condemning Google News service to remove all articles citations from some French-speaking newspapers. The Google cache is also considered illegal in Belgium (see beginning of the story here).

In an interview with the “Echo” (Belgian) newspaper, Alain Strowel, lawyer specialised in authors’rights, said the judgement is correct but also raised several questions:

• What is exactly behind the word “cache”? If a cached document is still formatted as the original document, I understand it could be forbidden by the law. But I guess all the search engines are using indexes where they put all the words from any webpage (regular webpage or newspaper article: it’s just HTML). What about these indexes? If they are considered as a cache, then any webpages from these newspapers shouldn’t be indexed and they’ll then be unavailable. Since they also sued Yahoo! and MSN (with much less buzz), this will mean they won’t be visible on the internet, except if you directly type their URL. Is that what they want?
• Alain Strowel said this judgement can bring back the debate about the exceptions to authors’rights. Currently, the exceptions are those ones (in French). With all the so-called “laws against terrorism”, I fear this will mean a reduction of the number of exceptions.
• It’s difficult to obtain web statistics on these newspapers websites. A lot of people guessed the number of visits will go down but it’s the first time a journalist (the interviewer) said this number actually decreased (and the lawyer agreed).

Finally, this whole thing won’t make me change my opinion:

1. If you want to play and publish on the internet, get to know its rules (robots.txt, no-cache HTML tag, …) and then you can complain if something is still wrong (they even don’t know how to correctly use the simple robots.txt file)
2. Internet is open by nature: if you really don’t want something to be read, cited, copied, etc. don’t put it on the internet.

You can read an interesting point of view on ArsTechnica: “Google defeated in Belgian copyright case; everyone but Google loses“. And one of the newspapers’news editor is inviting people to discuss about on-line newspapers; it could be interesting 🙂

In this article, Brad Reagan gives many examples where the use of electronic data begins to cause problem, in a preservation perspective. The causes can be a new software that is not fully compatible with previous data models, new physical formats (unable to play old formats), too much raw information, etc. For the moment, free projects like the Internet Archive or the Free Archive (a.o.) are trying to cope with this problem.

Although the dangers of a “digital blackout” really exist, I think the author forgets one important aspect of information from the past: we already lost a lot of it. What is left is what time left us, often with some damages. It survived time, taking many different forms and paths, different storage procedures, different media, different locations, etc.

Instead of trying to store everything, maybe we should look at storing the most relevant information only. But now the question would be: how to know what is relevant and what is not? I vaguely feel that one can also add a notion of time: the e-mails I receive about a future party or a new product are not worth for more than 1 or 2 years although electronic exchanges that led to the discovery of siRNA, e.g., are much more important.