A while back in my series on internet news (still not complete!) I criticized using relative time stamps on news articles. Those are the type that tell you that news is from, say, 3 hours ago. I have since discovered another problem with this method of time-stamping news.
As I mentioned then, I use myYahoo for market-oriented news. On their home page, but not on pages specific to stock portfolios or individual stocks, they use these relative timestamps on all news, including those fed via RSS feeds. Their system has been misbehaving recently.
From the symptoms of the problem it appears that the time-stamp is not relative to the time the article was published. Instead it is relative to the time the article arrived via the feed. If the feed mechanism misbehaves the timestamps are wrong.
As examples, news articles for stocks and from RSS feeds are periodically disappearing. Okay, so problems do happen. The bigger problem is that when they fix the problem and the news is refreshed, the timestamp is relative to the time the news was refreshed! That's not good. I am seeing, for example, news for thinly-traded stocks (which tend to have few news articles) showing up as from 2 hours ago that were in fact published weeks ago. That ain't news.
One more reason these service should stick with clock times for time-stamps.
Friday, August 22, 2008
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