So Tom has been doing a great job of teaching all of us the intricacies of Google ranks and white supremicism, and as his last few posts suggest, he’s become a bit obsessed (in a good way, of course) with knocking martinlutherkingDOTorg down a few pegs. To be honest, I’m feeling somewhat chagrined at the fact that I’ve had something to do with the advancement of the MLK.org site (whatever small) and just for the record, I’ve gone back through all of my content that I can and removed any links that I might have still had. (That includes a couple of old blog posts, my presentation wiki, and my H2O Playlist. I’m sure Tom will let me know about any others that I may have missed…) To put it succinctly…”my bad.”
Tom has also taken the step of setting up NOTmartinlutherking.org so that if you REALLY have to link to the site, you can link to Tom’s page and it will redirect you with a nice, pithy disclaimer to make sure you know what you’re really getting. He’s even gone so far as to keep that page from showing up in the Google link list for the offensive site.
All of this of course serves as a great reminder of the complexities of the information world in which we live these days. And of how much there is to learn and make a part of my practice.
technorati tags:tom-hoffman, literacy, google, education
Unfortunately what he’s also now doing is threatening librarians and educators. If they don’t agree to change their links he’s at the very least implying that he’s going to set up a ‘Hall of Shame’. How quickly it is to move from a sensible idea and beginning to morph into that which he supposedly hates.
Moreover, the link he has suggested will NOT work, because not all search engines honor the method that he has chosen. In fact, if a lot of people link to it, that may make that particular page even more important, and given that it only has one outbound link it could actually serve to tell other search engines that the racist site is even MORE important than it was previously.
It’s a nice idea, but Hoffman is going way beyond the pale with this; threats, for whatever reason, are not the way to get people on board.
I have downloaded the movie from the site. Well, I downloaded it a couple of times. But no matter how often I do this – it always seems to be somthing wrong with the sound. So I have to download it again. Have you made the same experience? Give it a try. Maybe you can help me with my codec problem. The movie is only about 8 MB in size so downloading it once isn’t creating a lot of traffic. Kind regards from Germany, Dan
So overall while I’m reading education blogs the big push is to educate our students to be able to recognize what information is reliable and truthful. Over the last week or so I have seen just about all the blogs I read post the links to good Martin Luther King information.
I agree with what Tom is doing, but somehow feel like he is missing the point, and now just trying to manipulate data to make it look the way he wants it to look. Now he has even moved on to threats of adding people to his “Skinhead Enablers Hall of Shame.”
The unfortunate thing is the information is going to be there, and it is going to be accessible. Teach internet literacy.
Doesn’t it all make you think of wind mills?
The point is not that the information is there. The point is helping people to see the difference, and care about it!
— dave —
Dave,
I am not completely convinced that the ‘rel=”nofollow’ attribute is widely-enough respected by search engine bots, and that is part of the reason that I didn’t want to spend a lot of time exclusively trying to get people to do that.
The best that you can do is to use robots.txt, which is as well established and widely respected as you’re going to get for this kind of thing, but it is relatively difficult to implement, particularly if you aren’t the admin of the entire site.
Beyond that, if those two methods fail, it will be easy to tell, as http://notmartinlutherking.org will start showing up in relevant searches. If that happens, we can contact the search engine operator and explicitly request that notmartinlutherking.org be removed from their index.
And even if that fails, I can add 50 relevant links to information on Dr. King and the civil rights movement, so that 98% of notmartinlutherking.org’s PageRank will go to sympathetic sources.
If you have a better idea for handling this, I’m certainly open to hearing it.
And what do I supposedly hate?
So far, this project has been pretty successful thus far. Of the incoming links we’ve identified, a significant number have already been fixed, with a simple, polite email. People don’t want to support the skinheads, and are happy to make the fix.
I don’t really know that it will need to go beyond that point. It seems like there are a lot more incoming links that my initial searches have found, so spidering out more links and sending more polite emails is probably the best use of my time on this matter.
I certainly understand that this is an easy mistake to make, particularly when those who have been leading the effort to teach internet literacy for the past decade have done such a spotty job. I’m not trying to play gotcha here.
But schools shouldn’t be using their authority to promote a site like martinlutherking dot org, and if they flatly refuse to sanitize their link, I don’t see any reason not to publically call them on it. But really, we’re a ways away from that point, and in all likelihood I will have lost interest by then.
One small connection in the above… by routing people through notmartinlutherking.org, I can do both ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ AND robots.txt.