I have posted a video of Jim Webb
introducing Obama to Virginia (June 5, 2008). It is followed by a
transcript of Jim Webb's commencement speech: "Economic Fairness" (June
7, 2008).
Turns out it was just a one-digit typo -- Sen. Webb spoke here in 2007, before I joined the Radford faculty. But the typo reminds me that I really wish blogs, student projects and sites of all kinds would protect themselves from spreading such errors. It's easy: Just use the basic Web feature of hypertext to link back to original sources. That provides corroboration and transparency, even when the author -- blogger, journalist or copyright law protester --feels a need to copy the full text instead of only linking to it. (From my students, I insist on a link, a summary, and some original addition to the overall conversation.)
As for accurate information, Google to the rescue: The senator's own site has the original text as do a few other places, including one with a commencement photo collection:
- http://webb.senate.gov/newsroom/record.cfm?id=273702
- http://www.bornfighting.com/index.php?option=com_content&;task=view&id=48&Itemid=4
- http://www.raisingkaine.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=8359
All of those links may come in handy later this week, if a reporter calls to interview me on the subject of "Web disinformation." I don't claim to be an expert, but when a friend from Radford's news office called to ask whether I could help on that topic, I mentioned a research panel I was on at a national conference a couple of years ago and a modest 1995 course paper a grad school classmate and I wrote. Those may be enough expertise for the reporter. We'll see.
Case in point: I archived a copy of that 1995 Web disinformation paper, and Google still finds more than 100 links to it, but many of them point to a Web server named "Blake.unc.edu" that slipped off Paul Jones's desk more than 10 years ago! One prominent link even cites Paul as my co-author, in place of Bob Henshaw. Paul was our professor at UNC for one of his pioneer courses on important issues related to that new thing, the World Wide Web.
For an early sample of what could be called Web meta-disinformation, our main page was copied and re-posted at a "uva.edu" address a few years later, under the name of a University of Virginia student. I heard about it, tracked him down, and was told he just meant it as an exercise -- a class demonstration of disinformation -- for a course taught by the very same Paul Jones -- who was spending a year away from Chapel Hill.
