Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Dropping a love bomb

Citizenship and Information Literacy

**Update: In the original post, I linked to Toms blog, but not to the specific post. Consider that fixed! Also, Tom has now tweaked his original post. I've reflected his tweak below and the copy and paste code is now his latest version.

This is an interesting idea from Tom Hoffman (found via John) - a socially responsible use of a Google bomb! Up until now, I have only seen Google bombs used to humiliate friends and annoy presidents, but Tom suggests using a Google bomb to try and knock martinlutherking[dot]org off the front page of Google results.

This sounds to me like an excellent idea. A double whammy: not only could you use something like this with pupils to teach them about good, reliable sources of information on the American Civil Rights movement, but you can teach citizenship within the context of ICT and information literacy. Brilliant!

So what do you do? Just use your blog, or some other web page to link the text "Martin Luther King" to good sources of information and don't create an active link to martinlutherking[dot]org. Easy! If enough people do it, Google should pick up the good links and push the bad one off the front page.

Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King

And copied from Tom's post, here’s the code. You should be able to just paste this into a blog post.

<p>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr." title="Martin Luther King">Martin Luther King</a><br />
<a href="http://www.thekingcenter.org/" title="Martin Luther King">Martin Luther King</a><br />
<a href="http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2269" title="Martin Luther King">Martin Luther King</a><br />
<a href="http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1964/king-bio.html" title="Martin Luther King">Martin Luther King</a><br />
<a href="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/mlk/" title="Martin Luther King">Martin Luther King</a><br />
<a href="http://www.time.com/time/time100/leaders/profile/king.html" title="Martin Luther King">Martin Luther King</a><br />
<a href="http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2000/01/24/mlk/index.html" title="Martin Luther King">Martin Luther King</a><br />
<a href="http://www.pps.k12.or.us/schools-c/pages/buckman/timeline/kingframe.html" title="Martin Luther King">Martin Luther King</a><br />
<a href="http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/" title="Martin Luther King">Martin Luther King</a><br />
</p>


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