Well here is today’s rant:
I published a couple of blog posts last week that I thought were pretty darn good. One of my readers agreed, and suggested that I submit them to the Wall Street Journal. I thought that was an excellent idea.
Publishing entities like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times require that anything you submit to them cannot have been published elsewhere first. Well, I figured since I had only published it on my blog, and only about five people had read it, I could fudge that and send it in as not published.
Guess again.
If anyone were to search for the unique content of that blog post, while a search would read come back as “file not found,” there’s this little thing in the Google search results called “cached.” And if you click on that little link,
boom, there is my “published elsewhere first” article. Thus, whatever slight opportunity I may have had to get into the op-ed page of a major newspaper is gone. Thanks a lot.
Now granted, one can contact Google and say it is an emergency and they will go and erase it for you . . . But there’s all kinds of complications in terms of will they ever index your site again, I don’t know, it just freaked me out. And that’s just Google. I assume the other search engines also have cached versions of it tucked away someplace.
Google says that they eventually erase these cached copies, but it’s been a week, and it’s still there.
So anyway, a word to the wise, entities like facebook and Google make their money by being librarians of your content, so there’s no real incentive on their part to erase anything. So if you don’t want something to be out there forever, don’t put it on the Internet.
© Justin Locke
Justin Locke is an entertaining speaker. Call him to appear at your next event.
