OK, this is going to be everywhere in approx. 30 seconds (in fact, too late), but it’s cool enough to be posted in here in the dim, dim chance you don’t see it in your travels through the Web.

There’s been a fair amount of hand-wringing since the start of the Age of Blogs about accuracy. How on earth do we trust anything we read on the Internet? Bloggers can say anything!

Just this year, there was a conference on blogging, journalism, and credibility.

Then there’s been some hand-wringing over the fact that you have to use phrases like “steady downward trend” to describe the recent credibility ratings of newspapers.

I’ve got a proposal.

Imagine: you come across an article on the Web purporting to be journalism or contain elements of journalism. So you cruise on over to StraightenTheRecord.org (or whatever) and you search for the name of the text’s author or publication. Up pops a screen listing all the corrections made on articles by that author or in that publication.

But you’re a tad underwhelmed. You had caught an error of fact in the document you were reading that isn’t listed on this page.

So you log in to the site and edit the record (it being some sort of a wiki), adding your correction to the stack.

Read more…

I’m not sure I understand what’s going on here, but I know it’s insane. (Via Steve Rubel by way of Dan Gillmor.)

Most of you have probably already caught Tom Friedman’s essay on globalization in this week’s NYT Magazine, signalling the arrival of his latest book.

But please, before you wade into Friedman prose that extends a good 15 pages beyond his usual allotted space, arm yourself with the quality snark of press critic impresario Matt Taibbi:

The hallmark of the Friedman method is a single metaphor, stretched to column length, that makes no objective sense at all and is layered with other metaphors that make still less sense. The result is a giant, gnarled mass of incoherent imagery. When you read Friedman, you are likely to encounter such creatures as the Wildebeest of Progress and the Nurse Shark of Reaction, which in paragraph one are galloping or swimming as expected, but by the conclusion of his argument are testing the waters of public opinion with human feet and toes, or flying (with fins and hooves at the controls) a policy glider without brakes that is powered by the steady wind of George Bush

Even though we’ve been on intermittent papal death watch for the past five years, and his death today has the dubious honor of being possibly the least surprising passing in the history of human mortality, the NYT managed to bollocks his obit. Classic. [ PDF evidence ]

Pastel Vespa covers Wheatus’ “Teenage Dirtbag,” over at Copy, Right?

Remember Fahrenheit? Probably not, ’cause I think I was the only one with a mild fixation on it. Anyway, it’s now called “Indigo Prophecy” and it’s being published by Atari, not Vivendi Universal. Ostensibly coming out for the PC in June, for the PS2 and Xbox in September. [ Interviews 1 | 2 with game creator David Cage ]

Will Google never stop coming up with the goodness?? Introducing Google Gulp. That logo is hott, too.

“I know that I only knew him for a day, and much of that time I was wasted and he was a little drunk, but I do remember liking it when I looked into his eyes and I liked it when he put his hand on my back when we were in the car to make sure I was doing okay. I really liked how he held my hair back when I was throwing up.” — Buffy06, LJ Poet Laureate

A new literary magazine hopes to bring the long tail of blogging to the world of scholarly criticism. May it fare well, and may it all be much, much shorter than this ridiculous inaugural post. (Glossary: Long tail.)