World History
Do Historians Have a Responsibility to Warn the Public About Misleading Websites? This is an interesting post by Randall Bytwerk at the History News Network. This is thought provoking and I am not sure what the answer is.
I do like these suggestions he offers for dealing with the Holocaust denial site Hitler Historical Museum which does well in search engines for the word Hitler:
1. We should all pay attention to our institution's web sites. As I said, I found a number of .edu sites that link to the "Hitler Historical Museum."
2. Some of us can do what we can to reduce the number of links to the site. For example, I have removed about 20 links to the site from Wikipedia (which anyone can edit) from about a dozen language sites. This is worth doing, since whatever one thinks of the Wikipedia project, an astonishing number of people, including many of our students, use it. It also requires continuing monitoring, since there is nothing to prevent people from putting the links back on Wikipedia. I've emailed sites that look to be linking to the HHM in ignorance urging them to remove the link, with some success. It takes Google a while to register such changes, but I'm hoping that over time, the reduced number of links from reliable sites will lower the HHM's Google ranking.
3. Finally, following Marcuse's suggestion, we might consciously choose to link to high quality sources. The more links to such sources, the higher their ranking on the search engines will be. We don't all have to link to the same sites, but if people could agree on a few of the best sites on the Internet, it would surely help (e.g., Gerhard Rempel's site). I don't find a lot of good sites with .edu addresses, but it might be a good project for someone to develop a solid page on Hitler. My German Propaganda Archive, for example, averages about 8,000 visitors a day, and has led to all sorts of interesting things.
In essence, Bytwerk is suggesting that academics and historians actively become involved in promoting good sites on the Web and making it hard for bad ones to be found. This is called Search Engine Optimization and professionals in the Internet world do this full-time. History quacks tend to be good at learning the SEO ropes too. Although it will be hard for historians to beat the pros at the Web game, efforts in this area probably will pay off some. Google and other search engines like authority sites. And the .edu at the end of a site does mean something to the search engines.
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OCEAN Indexes the best history content on the net, including material in History World, from which it evolved. Also offers a toolbar with history search and timeline of world history. From the site: OCEAN (One-Click Edited-Access Network) is new...
World History
Do Historians Have a Responsibility to Warn the Public About Misleading Websites?
Do Historians Have a Responsibility to Warn the Public About Misleading Websites? This is an interesting post by Randall Bytwerk at the History News Network. This is thought provoking and I am not sure what the answer is.
I do like these suggestions he offers for dealing with the Holocaust denial site Hitler Historical Museum which does well in search engines for the word Hitler:
1. We should all pay attention to our institution's web sites. As I said, I found a number of .edu sites that link to the "Hitler Historical Museum."
2. Some of us can do what we can to reduce the number of links to the site. For example, I have removed about 20 links to the site from Wikipedia (which anyone can edit) from about a dozen language sites. This is worth doing, since whatever one thinks of the Wikipedia project, an astonishing number of people, including many of our students, use it. It also requires continuing monitoring, since there is nothing to prevent people from putting the links back on Wikipedia. I've emailed sites that look to be linking to the HHM in ignorance urging them to remove the link, with some success. It takes Google a while to register such changes, but I'm hoping that over time, the reduced number of links from reliable sites will lower the HHM's Google ranking.
3. Finally, following Marcuse's suggestion, we might consciously choose to link to high quality sources. The more links to such sources, the higher their ranking on the search engines will be. We don't all have to link to the same sites, but if people could agree on a few of the best sites on the Internet, it would surely help (e.g., Gerhard Rempel's site). I don't find a lot of good sites with .edu addresses, but it might be a good project for someone to develop a solid page on Hitler. My German Propaganda Archive, for example, averages about 8,000 visitors a day, and has led to all sorts of interesting things.
In essence, Bytwerk is suggesting that academics and historians actively become involved in promoting good sites on the Web and making it hard for bad ones to be found. This is called Search Engine Optimization and professionals in the Internet world do this full-time. History quacks tend to be good at learning the SEO ropes too. Although it will be hard for historians to beat the pros at the Web game, efforts in this area probably will pay off some. Google and other search engines like authority sites. And the .edu at the end of a site does mean something to the search engines.
- What Is Your Favorite History Site - Open Comments
Over the years, I have become very protective of my comments. They have been targeted as prime spam space by many spammers and I still have to delete many spam submissions. One of the rules I enforce is that links to others sites almost always result...
- Random History
Random History - This site offers history and word origins on random topics, from proms to the history of celebrity. Visitors can peruse random history articles or request new topics. There are no details on who is creating these articles. Further, the...
- History Directories.
History Directories. I have previously mentioned several excellent Web directories that list history sites such as Yahoo! and the Open Directory Project. These are good sources for history sites on the Web as the directories are manually reviewed by real...
- World History Web Resources: An Annotated Guide
World History Web Resources: An Annotated Guide Michael Lorenzen at Central Michigan University has put up this guide to world history Web resources. I discovered this when I was reading his literacy blog yesterday. Michael also keeps his American Presidents...
- Ocean
OCEAN Indexes the best history content on the net, including material in History World, from which it evolved. Also offers a toolbar with history search and timeline of world history. From the site: OCEAN (One-Click Edited-Access Network) is new...