(2010-08-23) Rosenberg Associated Content Google News Slude

Scott Rosenberg examines the crapping writing that gets Associated Content to the top of Google News results. But when Google tells me that this drivel is the most relevant result, I can't help thinking, the game's up. The Wagner tubas are tuning up for Googledammerung: It's the twilight of the bots. Some great links in there, too:

• Mark Dery on True Slant and other sins of contemporary pseudo-JournalIsm. I didn't know E How is owned by Demand Media. In the Observer article, there’s talk of “screening” the “hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands” (D’Vorkin’s words) of what the reporter says will be Forbes/Slant’s “amateur ‘topic-specific credible’ journalists,” but that phrasing suggests that the vetting will be limited to the hiring process, not daily editing, a concession to the Darwinian realities of the recession-hammered news business that a Forbes staffer quoted in the Observer article seems to concede when s/he acknowledges that some Forbes/Slant bloggers “will be stock-touts, and we know that, and Lewis knows that, but he says that’s a cost of the model.” Ain’t no facepalm big enough to convey the brain-hurting wrongheadedness of this strategy.

• Danny Sullivan on the bad FeedBack loop between Google News and GoogleTrends. Chocomize my Ultimate Big Brother who's in a Chinese Traffic Jam with Miss Universe!