Yesterday I hosted a session on law for my MA Online Journalism students, which I thought I would embed below.

Some background: I teach all my sessions in a coffee shop in central Birmingham – anyone can drop in. This week I specifically invited local bloggers, and so the shape of the presentation was very much flavoured by contributions from The Lichfield Blog‘s Philip John; Nick Booth from Podnosh and BeVocal; Talk About Local‘s Nicky Getgood; Hannah Waldram of the Bournville Village Blog; Gavin Wray, Matthew Mark, and Mike Rawlins of Stoke’s Pits N Pots. The editor of the Birmingham Post Marc Reeves also came for an hour to share his own experiences in the regional press.

Two things occurred to me during the process of preparation and delivery of the session. The first is that law in this context is much broader: as well as the classic areas for journalists such as defamation, you have to take into account online publishing issues such as terms and conditions, data protection and user generated content.

Secondly, I’ve long been an advocate of conversational teaching styles (one of the reasons I teach in a coffee lounge) and this was a great example of that in practice. The presentation below is just a series of signposts – the actual session lasted 4 hours and included various tangents (some of which I’ve incorporated into this published version). Experiences in the group of students and guests ranged across broadcasting, print, photography, online publishing, academic study, and international law, and I came out of the session having learned a lot too.

I hope you can add some more points, examples, or anything I’ve missed. Here it is:

PHP Freelancer

A couple months ago I installed a plugin on the blog that meant search engines would index links in comments: by default WordPress uses ‘nofollow‘ on comments to stop spammers abusing them to boost search engine rankings, but that prevents genuine commenters getting credit for their contributions.

One problem: as one commenter pointed out, the blog as a whole was set to ‘noindex-nofollow’ “which equals a no trespasing sign for search engines for ALL of the site’s links. It’s Google suicide.”

I added that problem to my vast to-do list, and moved on.

But that moved to the top of my to-do list recently when the BBC made a similar mistake with their linking mechanisms.

So I scoured this blog’s code to delete the meta tag nofollow reference – to no avail.

I called for help from Twitter followers, and got two very useful suggestions: Andy Dickinson found a plugin to alter the meta tags; and Gavin Wray pointed out the much simpler option: in the blog admin go to Settings > Privacy > and select make visible to search engines.

Invisible comments

But now I have a new problem. As Malcolm Coles pointed out in the comments, the commenting system IntenseDebate uses javascript, which means “the comments are invisible to search engines in any case because they now rely on javascript to be seen … (try looking at those pages with javascript off to see what I mean).”

This is not only a problem for this blog, but for any organisation which uses javascript for its comments system – including The Guardian, as Coles recently pointed out.

As I wrote this post, Malcolm emailed to tell me about a post he’d written about commenting systems and javascript generally. IntenseDebate had responded to say they were “rolling out a non-javascript-friendly version which will be visible to Google although it’s still in beta.”

So there’s hope yet, but I don’t like the accessibility issue at all, so should I switch back to standard comments?

PHP Freelancer