Readers offer insight into thorny Google question
Members of our electronic reader advisory board had much to say about the professor's request to somehow alter the Google search results regarding his name. Almost all of our advisory board members said the Victoria Advocate shouldn't agree to the ...

Will you join our growing reader advisory board?
More than 100 people responded last week to our request to join our new electronic reader advisory board. We still have plenty of room for you in the virtual meeting room. To join, please go to the Victoria Advocate Google ...

How much control should you have over your Web profile? Part II
Microfilm copies of the Victoria Advocate dating back to 1846 are digitized online by Google. Only Google engineers know the secret to how these millions of bits of data end up ranked in a search result. A professor is searching ...

How much control should you have over your Web profile?
A professor from another state recently visited our newspaper ethics board meeting to plead his case for Internet privacy and justice. The professor was alarmed to find a two-decade-old Victoria Advocate article suddenly appeared in a Google search of his ...

What's it like to work at a newspaper?
Author and former newspaperman Ray Ring wrote this brilliant description in his 1991 book "Arizona Kiss." I can tell you what its like to work for a newspaper. Imagine a combine, one of those huge threshing machines that eat up ...

When will Internet TV fully arrive?
When I was 19, I visited a college friend in Goodland, a town literally in the middle of nowhere on the western plains of Kansas. I was amazed to find her family had something called cable TV. While we were ...

How can you access our newspaper archives?
A reader asked recently about how far back our online archives go. The good news is you now can search back much farther than ever before. Google, which apparently is digitizing the world, has scanned the Victoria Advocate's microfilm archives ...

How do you keep your child safe behind the wheel?
My baby girl learned to walk only yesterday. How can she already be learning to drive? I dropped my 15-year-old off Monday night at a drivers education class and took a big gulp. As I stood in the hallway outside ...

What's up with the half-page ad wrap of the front page?
About a month ago, an advertising manager brought back a half-page ad wrap of the Los Angeles Times' front page. This was a new concept for us, so we ran the idea by our internal ethics board. Along with the ...

How is the government spending your money?
I'm pleased to call your attention to a special series that starts Sunday under the direction of Public Service Editor Gabe Semenza. Semenza analyzed public databases to learn what federal stimulus money reached the Crossroads region and how it was ...