While vanity surfing on the new Microsoft search engine Bing.com I found the following link:
Fair enough I guess. But the more I thought about it the more I found it strange that I couldn’t remember making the comment. Naturally I followed the link to see when I said such a thing. Here is what came up:
It turns out that since I commented on Dave Winer’s statement on FriendFeed, a comment I have since deleted thanks to this little discovery, Dave’s thought on Facebook from over a year ago was appearing on a aggregated page of all of my FriendFeed comments. Bing found that page and indexed it. Fair enough. However, the way Bing lists the data makes it appear as if I made the comment myself! Agree or disagree, Bing lists the original quote from Dave Winer in such a way that it appearing to have been written by me instead.
A misattributed remark on the relative value of Facebook isn’t going to destroy me or anything. But what if I had commented on something more ugly? What if it hadn’t been an R-rated tech rant from Dave Winer but had been me taking a stand against a racist? Stand up against hate speech and Bing tells the world I was the one that wrote the hate speech in the first place?!?
Not good Microsoft… Not good at all.
