Interesting post today on one of Wired’s blogs (links to a recent post at The Volokh Conspiracy) relating to the potential applicability of Section 230 to Bloomberg’s “role” in United’s free fall earlier this week.

Lots of juicy issues here, but time constraints force me to simply take this opportunity to quickly vent on a longstanding pet peeve of mine.  Why don’t all “news” articles on the web contain a static publication date in or very near the article text?  I’m not necessarily sympathetic to all of Google’s positions on this matter, but one thing I will agree with is that I find it terribly annoying when I view a news article on the web, whether following a search or while browsing a media outlet’s website, and find myself struggling to determine when the article was written.  How difficult can it be for online publishers to get this right?  Maybe there is some SEO, advertiser and/or “staleness” issue out there that is beyond my comprehension.  But they should all take a backseat to including critical information such as a publication date when disseminating “news” articles.

Kudos to the New York Times, which in my experience not only consistently lets you know the date an article was published, but whether, when, and where the article appeared in the hard copy version of the newspaper.

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A note to my faithful readers (if there are any of you left):  It’s been an unusually busy summer for me.  I won’t bore you with any of the details, but I do hope to get back on the horse here soon and resume regular postings.  If that proves to be impossible, I may accept the invitation (if it’s still outstanding when the time comes) of one of my favorite technology bloggers to submit occasional posts on his blog.  In the meantime, I hope you’ll continue to subscribe/stop by here.

-Michael