Has Inkless Wells been censored?
Posted by Joseph Thornley on April 11th, 2007
Macleans political columnist Paul Wells never hesitates to weigh in with a trenchant comment or a jab at those who he feels need to be called out. And this makes him one of the more entertaining political bloggers. And he seems to be given free rein by the good folks at Macleans to take runs at just about anyone.
But has Paul met his match – in the IT Department at Rogers?
My feedreader picked up the following post:
Welcome, friends!
by Paul Wells
The good news is that, as part of the new bigger Rogers family, all A- Channel employees will be permitted to write blogs with atrocious software on un-navigable websites that will never, ever improve. Because that’s what working for Rogers offers us all. No, don’t thank us!
Well, interesting, I thought. Paul’s really biting the hand this time.
So, I wandered over to Inkless Wells to look at the original post … and guess what? It’s not there!
Yes, the headling, “Welcome, friends” appears. But when you click on the headline for the post, the following message appears where the text of the post would appear:
There are no entries at this time. Check back soon.
Only for this post. Click on the headline of any other post and you’ll see the full text of the post associated with that headline.
Has the IT Department at Rogers managed to do something that Prime Ministers, Deputy Ministers and politicians of every stripe have long wished they could do – muzzle Paul?
Now we know where real power resides.
April 11th, 2007 » 1:48 pm
hehe… Someone’s trying to hide something…
Perhaps Paul got cold feet and deleted the post? The reason you see the headline for it is because that post is still in the RSS feed..
April 11th, 2007 » 3:45 pm
Of course, given what I’ve experienced with the Maclean’s blog site, it’s far from impossible for it to be just a glitch about a glitch …
April 11th, 2007 » 8:12 pm
Hmm… checking my RSS reader…
Yup – same here. I get the entertaining full post popping up in Google Reader, but the same missing info when I click through to Paul’s blog.
Nasty. Maybe it’s a glitch, but if it is, it’s an awfully suspicious one.
And if it isn’t a glitch – if this is conscious censorship – it demonstrates that clearly someone doesn’t get RSS.
April 11th, 2007 » 8:31 pm
As of 9:30 pm it’s still showing in the RSS feed. For that reason I would have to lean more toward the glitch possibility. If the post was deleted I would think that it would disappear from the feed when it was refreshed, unless it only refreshes once per day or something strange like that.
April 11th, 2007 » 8:38 pm
Actually, having looked at the feed again, that could be the problem. The last build date shown –
* lastBuildDate * Tue, 10 Apr 2007 12:38:47 -0400 * lastBuildDate *
is the same time as his last post. If the post was deleted after that, the software doesn’t seem to have generated a new build of the feed.
April 12th, 2007 » 12:07 pm
It might not be what you think. Sometimes I take down my own posts if I write something stupid. Maybe Wells did the same.
In order to say it was censorship we’d probably have to see something from Rogers defending their alleged action. Or maybe Paul will tell us. Until then, I just don’t see it.
April 12th, 2007 » 6:23 pm
Ouch! It could be that this is a small error, or maybe like you said, he bit the hand that fed him – and the hand slapped back. Either way, consider it a reminder that Big Brother IT is always watching and waiting with the Ctrl+Alt+Del keys.
April 13th, 2007 » 10:17 am
That’s the way it goes when someone else pays your salary, same for any other private sector job. If an employer doesn’t like what you are doing they certainly know how to rectify it one way or another, like zap a post they don’t like. And their web sire is a stone.