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Wednesday, October 02, 2002
Just Shoot Me: I've Been Cited on Slashdot
You really don't want one of your articles to be cited on Slashdot.
My editorial "An End to Metatags" - which, incidentally, received a favorable note from SE guru Danny Sullivan in this month's Search Engine Report - was the subject of the usual interminable Slashdot discussion.
I'm grateful to the 5% of posters who actually gave me some credit for having half a brain and actually reading my articles. The rest, however, chose to ignore what I wrote. One developer said that metatags are still useful for purposes like refreshes. Yes, to be sure, and because I was specifically referring to keyword and description metatags, I concluded my second article with: "Metatags as we know them today - I refer specifically to the meta keyword and meta description tags inserted into the head of an HTML document - don't factor into this future." Did I say anything about freakin' meta refresh tags?
I also made the point that metadata is useful in closed, less-spoofable environments, and for the purposes of site search and corporate intranet info retrieval. Didn't matter, Slashdot's resident geniuses felt compelled to explain all of that to me as well. You have to laugh! The only other place you can go to have your work so wildly mistreated is to an academic conference. Unlike Slashdotters, though, academics have read more than a paragraph of something or other, even if not the work they're currently criticizing.
I hereby sentence Slashdotters to present their latest beta to an unreceptive crowd at the next annual meeting of the Society for Postmodern Dog Semiotics.
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
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D'oh!
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