Blogger’s “Backlinks” are buggy and breach an existing standard. I don’t care if they are owned by Google, Blogger has fallen behind.

NewsCorp can probably pull it off, Rupert’s got the gumption to do it properly, but the rest don’t exactly have histories of risk-taking innovaton.

No big media is going to get the full benefit of Google-juice unless they start making proper outgoing links and crediting their sources.

It’s not a question of technology, that’s available, as are the business models. But big media in Australia still keep their archives behind paid-only firewalls, they don’t get it. This is obvious in the majority of the blog content they have, which is on par with emotive and socially destructive talkback radio.

They’re still using old media models, emotional controversy is the backbone of useless media like Today Tonight and many of the Opinion columns. They insult the intelligence of their audience, which encourages the kind of commenters that most blogs avoid like the plague (unless they too follow the talkback radio model).

If they want to live in the new media, they have to change their models, as well as the technology and processes that back them up.

I’ve seen it reported recently in a few erstwhile media places that NewsCorp is going with either a Slashdot or a full community moderated system soon. Laws need to be changed but in the meantime, cases in Europe (that Brit Chancellor of the Exchequer case) and America (the golfer one) are against the commenter/poster, not the social network host.

James Farmer and media types want the googlejuice without having to dole any out. (ie link to me but I won’t link to you). fer shame. I remember James as the guy who was anti-citizen journalism but wears nice hats.

Web 3.0/4.0 should fix a lot of these issues – distributive discussions, breaking it up into small pieces in lots of places. We just need Yahoo! Pipes to have a prettier front end and all the palaver goes away. No?

Most of them don’t embrace trackbacks (but hey, neither does Google’s Blogger), which are far more important than comments. Comments are a lot of overhead to moderate and for big media, there’s no ROI for all that extra cost. Trackbacks at least have a barrier to entry, you have to have a blog capable of trackbacks and you have to know how to create a trackback. Spammy ones can be blocked.

On top of that, there is an ROI as trackbacks increase PageRank (although they would waste this anyway as they squirrel all the content behind their pay-per-view firewalls). Big media is crazy not to allow trackbacks and skip comments altogether. Big media cannot be held responsible for what bloggers post on their blogs, it’s a lawyer thing.