Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Yahoo!'s Latest Attack on Semantics

I have to confess that curiosity drew me to the headline "Inventive Bar Uses Stock Market Approach to Price Drinks" in the NEWS FOR YOU list on this morning's Yahoo! News site, even though I was pretty sure that, compared with the breaking story about our sending troops into Jordan, it would not really qualify as "news." It didn't. As a matter of fact, it did not even come from an accredited news source. Rather, it was a post to the Trending Now blog, managed by Yahoo! News.

The icon for this blog sports the subtitle "The news you need to know." I suppose that, if there were some interesting economic analysis about coupling the price of drinks to stock market behavior, I might need to know that, in case it had an impact on how I managed my own portfolio; but analysis was clearly not the order of the day. For that matter, neither was "now." When I read this post, it was eighteen hours old. That hardly counts as "now" in Internet time. If high crimes and misdemeanors against semantics were a capital offense, Yahoo! would be facing the prospect of spending time in the big house!

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