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The Steam Powered Internet Machine from 2006. The Guardian
No really. Well, OK, since I’ve just “written off” my main email account as spammed to death and started again with a brand spanking new one, I also decided to do some house cleaning and, with the exception of a few important items, deleted all emails over a month old. The liberation of decluttering!
But, I really was using email back in 1991, in the UK. Admittedly, it was only inside the firm I worked for, but internationally within the partnership.
I was online in 1997, which I consider to be late to the party, but it wasn’t available here in Tenerife much before that (6 months, give or take.)
From 1999, I was making money online and, in mid-2001, was earning more per month than I did working for that exalted firm of beancounters accountants.
My blog really was started in 2003. In fact, it only looks like it started in 2004, because I re-dated a few posts into January of that year, to make it tidy.
Indeed, I’ve been playing with computers (no, actually, for work purposes, not games) since the late 70’s and using luggable PCs at home since the mid-80s. Any earlier and they really would have had to have been steam driven! 
(Don’t go thinking I’m obsessed and keep everything tidy though!)
Anyway, I don’t tend to waste spend much time around many marketers’ blogs, so I wasn’t aware of something that’s going on, which Neil Shearing describes in this post and asks, Is It Evil To Pad Your Blog With Backdated Content?
Yes, it’s evil to try to fake a long track-record online.
On the other hand, if those marketers were online to send those emails in 2004, then presumably, it’s possible that they could have had an “old fashioned” website, where their newsletter archives were stored. If they did, what is wrong with converting it to using an easier to maintain blog-driven system now?
The old dates are appropriate, because the content is really only being transferred from one URL (archive) to another (blog post).
It would be very pedantic to insist on it being done, but I suppose it is strictly correct - to state that it is a repost of something previously published elsewhere. You can’t link to the elsewhere it came from, because you’ll probably do 301 redirects for those anyway. And then you start to wonder if you should be writing “this has been moved from” on every page you ever moved?
Even if they didn’t ever get around to posting archives, because it was a pain in the backside, what’s wrong with them doing so now that blogging software has made it easier for the non-techy to publish what’s important, their content?
Always assuming that the content is “evergreen.”
Some of my own content about Tenerife previously appeared, or may have been rewritten from, articles I wrote for various newspapers and magazines in the past. Like everywhere else, there are certain places that don’t move and regular, annual events to mention and, there are only so many ways to say it!
Lots of authors, of various subjects, will be in similar positions.
Then there are genuine cases for backdating posts, also because the author couldn’t be posting now, like with The Diary of Samuel Pepys.
To borrow some wisdom from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves …
Azeem (Morgan Freeman): “I once heard a wise man say, “There are no perfect men in this world. Only perfect intentions.”
The crux of the matter is the intent. If it’s to help and inform, publishing still useful information, no matter how old it is, surely presents no problem.
If it’s to slap up any old crap in an attempt to fool both punters and search engines, then that’s evil and, it will soon be found out anyway.
How does the reader discern? Obviously, they just know if the content is helpful to them, but that, like beauty, is still somewhat “in the eye of the beholder.”
Neil’s post raises some very interesting questions and conundrums though, because genuine blogs are not going to be trusted or believed (if they ever were in the first place), if it becomes widely known that this practice is going on.
Readers could use something like the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine.
The theory being that, if a page purports to be from 2004, there ought to be a record of it going back to then. This theory breaks down when it is true, but the site disallowed the internet archive from crawling their content or the content started off on a Blogger Blog*Spot URL, was transferred to various business domains and, was later moved to a personal domain when it was converted to Wordpress (that also had the effect of changing all the file names.)
Ah, yes, true story (much shortened) of where most of this blog has been.
In this case, we’re not even talking about posts being backdated, they were already posted. The wayback machine probably has entries for the posts, under all the URLs that they have resided under, during their moveable feast around the dynamic web, but the reader is not going to know where to look.
Most of the time, it may be appropriate to just remove all date information from old content and post merely the core useful part, with today’s date or none.
There’s a chance that one or two honest to goodness marketers exist are using blogging software with that precise intention, but they simply don’t know that they can, or how to, remove the date information from displaying.
It’s fine to use blogging software as a Content management system (CMS), but marketers must not be allowed to get away with blithely ignoring the implications of doing so. It may need customization and they may need to find out how, or hire someone, to make necessary tweaks to cure potential ambiguity.
Having thought long and hard about this and, related to something I mused circularly about earlier, I came to the conclusion that we really need date stamps - and maybe “valid until” or “read by” dates - to remain on documents.
You never know when something has been superseded. Leave dates on and readers can more easily see which is the latest or compare versions.
Other times, because it would also be dishonest (or complicated, needing an explanation) to omit the fact that content had been published before, it may actually be the best option to reflect the true (backdated) date of the item.
The responsible and non-lazy (so it counts me out!) marketer, in that case, should think about adding a note to the bottom of those old posts which says when and where it was first published. By email, if that is where. If that was to a list, is there a public archive provided that you can link to as “proof?”
If it was at old domains you no longer own, think about finding the relevant entry in the Wayback Machine yourself and pointing to it (there’s no point linking to the domain that could, by now, be a porn site), so that the reader can verify easily that you speak the truth. That is, if your online reputation matters to you.
That’s not so easy if you’ve dragged thousands of pages of stuff all around the net for many years - as I have - like some kind of virtual bag lady.
Neil asks finally, “What’s next? Twitter tweets from 2001? Facebook pages from 1999? Squidoo Lenses from 1994?” It occurred to me that it must be the steam powered internet, but little did I know, even that’s already been done!
Written by Pamela Heywood - Visit Website | Leave a tip | Buy me something
Great post, Pamela. Of course, you’re right, it’s the intent that matters. I based my post on someone who had trawled their past email promos and put them on their blog as 2004 “content”… sometimes even leaving off the URL they were promoting in the original email. It was, to put it bluntly, tacky.
By the way.. 1997 was late to the party? Wow. I missed that memo! :p
Neil.
That bad, huh, tacky? It will inevitably be killed by its own uselessness
I guess, some people do these things, because they don’t know any better.
On the other hand, it struck me as an interesting subject, because it intertwines with repurposing content - which can be very valid and profitable (done right) and also with reputation management.
Oh hey, if 1997 was a respectable time to “join up” to the internet revolution, then I’m happy to get the good news. It just seemed at the time that everyone else had it already and, I had been impatiently enquiring about it for a while.
Things tend not to arrive in the Canary Islands until 30 years after they are established in the civilized world normally.