Connecting the same and similar and showing the source.
Posted this to Facebook yesterday afternoon, figured I’d start getting into the idea just a bit more… Facebook and Google Reader both need to aggregate “duplicate” posts and present them all more effectively. Google News seems to be able to do it decently, not sure why it has yet to trickle down.
Google News seems to do a good job of showing that there are 3,352 news articles which are pretty much all about this same piece of news. Providing the most recent, some of the most popular, video, and all other sources.
I suppose they could do a better job of showing who the originally broke the news though. The amount of generalized plagiarism online seems to have reached a point where everyone considers it acceptable copy, paste, perhaps reword the majority of the content. This almost creates a funnel system as you see larger entities pick up the story and add their spin. Share and spin alike I suppose. Where you’re lucky you’ll see the site provide a “source” or “via” link and you can eventually, hopefully, find your way back to the original source. Here’s an example of a trail for an average post on Engadget.
Google Reader for example has been great at recommendations but I’ve found that with friends and multiple sites “sharing” content, posts are often duplicated. Then of course if you want to find the source you end up having to cookie crumb your way back to what you think is the source. There’s times where this becomes a bit of a loop as well. By adding a SOURCE option and a button with a count of similar posts that might help things a bit.
Facebook can have a similar problem, of course when the stories are identical Facebook will group the posts across your friends and show you that indeed you and 4 others have posted it.
On Facebook, ideally there’d be a better way of presenting this… Both of these are talking about the same news event, one shared from Engadget, the other from Gizmodo, the photos are from Flickr and the original source for the story seems to be Neowin.
Facebook doesn’t show you similar stories and it doesn’t really help you identify the source (in this case Gallup) either.
Hmm, could probably keep going with this but need to think about it a bit more first… Note to self, update later.