RSS exposures

Interesting changes visible in the BBC RSS feed. I just posted to my linkblog a link to a story titled Senate rejects gay marriage ban (caption: "An attempt to change the US constitution to ban gay marriage has been rejected by the Senate.") which not so long after was replaced by Bush vows to pursue gay union ban (caption: "US President George W Bush says he will carry on trying to make homosexual marriages illegal in the United States.")

The first story is still accessible at its own URL, but only if you were lucky enough to catch it during its ephemeral appearance in the RSS feed. It is now gone from both the feed and the BBC world landing page.

There is probably nothing behind it apart a refinement, though I find both titles and captions quite different in the message they carry. The final article also misses a few points that were in the first one, such as "Same-sex marriage has been thrown into the spotlight after some US states and towns moved to make it legal" (action) only to keep the fact that 38 states have moved to ban it (reaction). Overall, my impression is that it moved from pointing to the rejection by the US senate of this project of Bush to relaying his efforts to have this issue on the radar before the election.

Let's forget the subject of these articles, the point is that it's still very interesting to watch how new channels such as RSS can expose things that were previously quite hidden, such as re-editing web content after its first publication. Cooking the books and RSS are not meant to go along.