So on my personalized Google home page (which recently replaced My Yahoo!), a “top news” story was shown: Same-sex marriage: The heated Assembly debate.
As I’m very interested in politics, I was curious and clicked on it. What I found was in fact now what I would classify as news. Instead, it was an opinion article. For me this was the first time Google News delivered me to an opinion article rather than what would typically be classified as concrete news. Granted, all news stories are subject to bias, but there is a clear line that can be drawn between opinion articles and normal news stories.
And that is the problem. Google News can’t tell the difference. Sure, they could ask their 4,500+ affiliates to classify the articles — and maybe they already do. But when the the author of that article is the Director of Legislative Affairs for California Family Alliance I can’t imagine they would follow the rules very closely anyway.
So to me it seems that Google News suffers from similar problems that Google Search does: it can be gamed and manipulated for political agenda. I have nothing wrong with opinion pages, but they should be in Google Opinion, not Google News.
What do you think?
Many of you probably already saw this on the official WebWork blog or official OpenSymphony blog, but my book is finally released! Check out the details here.
Danny asks if REST is too complicated. Funny, because I think the main problem with REST-style architeture is that it is too simple. The main problem is that you can’t easily express operations that aren’t simple CRUD. For example, queries are a bit more difficult. Sure, in HTTP REST implementations, you can use query strings, but for those of you that have actually used an HTTP-based REST architecture (I have at Spoke), it becomes difficult to expression complex queries using HTTP query strings.
Agree? Disagree? Share your experiences.
I’m very impressed with Firefox 1.5. On OS X especially the performance improvements are extremely noticable. When I read about the improved navigation stuff, I thought it sounded kind of stupid. Well, I guess I was the stupid one, because it really does make a difference!
Now hopefully my favorite extensions will get updated and then I’ll be all set.
So I’ve been doing a lot of work lately that uses XWork’s IOC container. I know it isn’t as full featured as Spring, but often one of the major complaints I hear about it isn’t that it doesn’t support all the features (AOP, etc), but rather that it requires “Aware” interfaces where Spring can auto-wire directly based on the presence of a setter.
I know, the aware stuff is definitely “clutter”, but it has some nice advantages that I recently become fond of during a major refactoring (changing all types of “Category” to “Skill”). Specifically, I changed a component from being named CategoryManager to SkillManager. Changing the setter, setCategoryManager(), was a simple refactoring in IDEA.
If I didn’t have the aware interfaces, I would have had to do a string find-and-replace, something I’m often much less comfortable with.
Does anyone else ever have trouble with this?
