Google News Crazy Pictures – Even the Largest Websites Can be Hit with Crazy Pictures

Running a website and keeping control over user generated content is not easy.  Even Google News has a hard time keeping relevant news articles from displaying something crazy, wacky, or borderline inappropriate.

The bottom line is that if you have a site that enables content to be collected in an automated fashion or provided by users or some other large block of people or companies, you need to have the editorial control and ability to monitor your site and take action quickly when something gets through.

Something will always get through, the key is to being able to adapt quickly and appropriately.

If you have a site that sells womens gold watches, you do not necessarily want a review to slip through that talks about something that might be inappropriate for your customers.  User reviews historically have been the most common area where spam or lewd comments might slip through.  Many spam blocking tools such as akismet for wordpress solve this problem, but finding a spam tool for images is another matter.

Whether you are Google News trying to enable relative news related captions to appear or a forum that enables users to establish a better connection with other users through avatars, personalized images, you will need to be vigilant for those images or pictures that might be swapped out or replaced.  One of the best controls is to require that images be loaded up to your own server where you can then manually review and approve them.  If you enable ‘hot linking’ (a link to an image hosted on a site out of your control) then a person might submit one image to be reviewed and once approved the person can upload a new image to the same location with the same file name.  The hot link will now be pointing to an image that you did not approve at all and maybe do not want.

1. Gaming Google News with Childish Images I have a confession to make.  I love the childish images that many so-called news organizations use to suck in traffic from Google News. This...
2. Google News Caught Sucking Zod Google News was caught sucking Zod this evening as they unwittingly ran a Chron.com article claiming that Hillary Clinton was seriously considering General Zod (from...
3. Minnesota Town Vanishes From Google Street Images – Will Employees follow? Remember that kind of cool feature in Google Maps that also makes your skin crawl every time you think about it?  I’m not talking about...
4. Google's Lost Opportunity to be Friends with Bloggers It is ironic that Google one of the largest providers of blogging software is unfriendly to bloggers.  Google suffers the common bloggers of the world...

Comments are closed.