Fast Fiction

A few weeks ago Sean Bonner posted about Google News and their screwy, secret and inconsistent policy for including blogs as new sources.

All of the Metblog sites should be added. Granted, not every post is news, but when it comes to big stories like Katrina, London Tube Bombings and Mumbia train bombings as well as the Pakistan Earthquakes and web censorship by the government in Saudi Arabia ... the sites are all over that stuff.

But the thing is that they’re not consistent (which you know is a pet peeve of mine), so I decided to see if I could get Candy Blog listed as a news source.

First try, I was turned down for the following reason:

“we currently only include sites with news articles that report on recent events.”

Okee dokee, I can understand that. But I started thinking about what I read there ... things like movie reviews and regurgitation of press releases and of course recipes. So why isn’t a candy review considered a recent event? My photos are original and many of the products are new ... why is that so different from a soft profile piece about an actor in a TV show? A fan site for Stargate SG-1 and Celebrity Babies are listed! Even the satirical Australian site called The Chaser gets in.

Second try, so I submitted again with an angle towards comparing my site to movie reviews and I got back:

“We don’t include sites that are written and maintained by individuals.”

So there you have it ... I guess since I’m taking my own photos, I’ve done myself in. If I’ve got no editor, I’m not worthy. I looked around a bit and only found one site run by an individual (Mongabay.com), but you know, I didn’t look at all 4,500 sources or anything.

Now, if you think differently, you’re free to tell them that you’d like to see me included on Google News. Of course you could also tell them to include the Metblogs sites too.