RE: [xml-dev] Citations (WAS RE: [xml-dev] W3C suckered by Microsoft?)

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

Someone came back offlist with the defense that 
blogs are 'casual conversation' and therefore, 
don't qualify for citations.

o  How many of your casual conversations are being 
   googled or indexed by 'bots?

o  How many of your casual conversations are being 
   aggregated by a bot?

o  How many of your casual conversations are returned 
   by topical queries?

None, hopefully.  But this is the web where that 
citation aggregation goes on continuously for all 
materials submitted to it. The web is, by its very 
architecture, an integrated open bibliographic 
hypermedia system. No content on it unless marked 
not to be indexed is unindexed. Unless non-serious 
blogs have meta tags to prevent them from being 
indexed, yes, the blogger has a citation obligation.

But, people ignore such obligations or forget, or 
don't know, so the first thing a researcher 
might want from Google or a similar engine is a 
way to exclude blogs from a search.  

That seems draconian to me.  So should one demand 
a means that only certain blogs, or blogs which 
meet certain specifications be returned by these 
queries?  Or perhaps one uses the 'some blogs are 
better' metrics that page ranking uses for authoritative 
pages to only include subwebs which have proven 
to have reliable citations.  Can that be gamed? 
Sure.  But so can scholarly research papers and 
all we have between us and that is the reputations 
of the academics who edit them, which is why bad 
citations or the lack of them are a 
career destroying offense in that world.

A job for the semantic web?

len