Well, it was a depressing email in my gmail box this morning. Google will stop indexing a huge number of posts from this blogspot.
I've always been aware of my mortality, and of the mortality of my ethical recycling messages. I have books on my shelf which are long, long out of print, which are both central to my morality and my thesis, and which I know are unlikely to ever be read again, much less appreciated by mentorees.
But the first one I looked at in the Google Indexing purge kind of stung.
It was from autumn 2009, when I had been a background check source for CBS Sixty Minutes producer Solly Granatstein, about Scott Pelley's notorious "wasted" minutes flying around with BAN.org's Jim Puckett, who was describing huge imports of CRT desktop monitors (purchased for $10 apiece, bearing only $2 of scrap copper) as being "primitively" mismanaged in Guiyu.
http://retroworks.blogspot.com/2009/08/cbs-60-minutes-wasteland-unseen-footage.html
Solly and Michelle Rey had stopped responding to my emails asking them to run a follow up or correction to the story, which had shown no evidence of CRTs processed in Guiyu, despite the claim "we followed the trail".
So I checked that one, and because the film evidence of the factories that had actually purchased the monitors circled by helicopter were posted in picasaweb, a google product offered to bloggers like myself for photo uploads, and Google has since stopped supporting picasaweb, that the blog will no longer show up in searches. So if you are a journalism student looking for CBS Wasteland's Polk Award on CRT disposal allegedly occuring in China in 2008, you won't find me.
A lot of people I met - "Swordfish" - in my career met me through the circulation of that specific blog. Author Adam Minter for example asked what to look for when he visited Guiyu (the three-story integrated IC chip market - Guiyu was a reuse-of-CPU and chips market, not a CRT monitor refurbisher. And what is upstream of the river where BAN's "samples" showed poisons more associated with textile manufacturing than e-waste). Adam later visited CRT remanufacturing factories. He's a journalist with actual knowledge of recycling. But the blog that connected us is now gone unless Google accepts my correction (now linked to photos.google not picasaweb).
But am I going to take the time to re-edit 520+ blogs? I had to find the one on CBS Wasted Leads via the Wayback Machine site to locate it and find the dated address to correct it on blogspot.
So, hopefully the blog influenced enough peer-reviewed research that it's not important today. But I really question Google's decisions here. There must be some way to Quarantine blogs with thousands of reads. Today the average reads per blog is about 30, down from 55 a few years ago, and so I post a lot less often (accessing more readers with Linkedin posts, tbh).
I don't know if Solly Granatstein and his team is retired today, or is interested in revisiting a story they reported on 16+ years ago. I still have the producers emails in my gmail account, with links to his team of the photos of the factories that were actually purchasing the CRT monitors for re-manufacturing in a process called semiknockdown, practiced by contract manufacturing factories for Dell and HP to create brand new "good enough" brands like Acer and Foxconn.
Simon Lin founded Acer, and Terry Gou founded Foxconn - two very important brands today which eclipsed the contract OEMs they started making CRT monitors for - and it's an important story today that no one was reporting on. I think that is still relevant. But I'm mortal... and someday my gmails with CBS will also be deleted.
I've submitted the CBS 60 Minutes blog, with new link to the photos album redirect. I know a lot of the blogs will be 404'd because they linked to youtube videos that have long ago had their addresses removed. I won't be going through 592 wayback machine searches anytime soon.
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