

Quick Action Helps Google Win Friends in Japan - bdr
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/11/technology/quick-action-helps-google-win-friends-in-japan.html?hp

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patio11
_Another convert is Sachiko Kobayashi. She lives in Sendai, a city at the
heart of the tsunami zone, and was in Kesennuma looking for a friend, a fellow
student in the koto, a traditional Japanese instrument. After Ms. Kobayashi
posted a query on a separate Web site, a stranger directed her to Person
Finder. There, she learned that her friend was alive._

There's a little trick to reading the New York Times, most commonly disaster
reporting or any time the story takes place in conditions of extreme hardship:
any time you see "a stranger", replace it with the reporter's name. They do it
out of a perceived ethical stricture to avoid putting themselves in the center
of the story.

After you know this exists, you'll see it _a lot_.

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T-R
I could see that, but is that necessarily the case all the time (particularly
if you see it a lot)? I'd be surprised if it wasn't ever the case that they
just didn't have permission, or the time, ability, or necessity to track down
a person, to cite them by name.

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patio11
Sometimes strangers are just strangers. Sometimes when the NYT reports that a
congressman has been sleeping with his pages it means that he was overcome
with boredom while trying to get through a printout of the budget. I wouldn't
bet that way, but it has probably happened.

Pick a likely verb, for example "asked", then look at the kinds of situations
where "asked a stranger" comes up. See if it makes more sense for them to be
a) a bystander who we couldn't track down but, nonetheless, are sure has no
pre-existing relationship to the person doing the asking or b) a NYT reporter.

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pnathan
This is a great example of the benefits of modern technology. Many things in
the modern web are toys: this is not. This is really a noble tool.

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TeMPOraL
I love when Google does things like that. There's an unique opportunity today
to leverage modern technology to actually help people in their troubles. It
might be a way of marketing, but whatever popularity they gain by it, I
believe it's deserved.

