I messed up a post below on the 9/11 Commission; I just plain got it wrong because I didn’t do my research well. I added a correction to that post, leaving my mistake for the world to see, as is our ethic in blogs. Then it occurred to me I should go farther and so I went to the sites where I’d seen links to that post and, where possible, I left a comment confessing my mistake. But now I also realize that readers who saw the post via RSS will have seen the original item but not the correction on it. That’s an issue for corrections in blogs. Similar issues exist in print: If you clip an article or just remember it and don’t see a correction — often buried — and don’t go looking for it in an archive where a correction may be attached, you can carry the error forward. Online, at least the original item can carry a correction for all those who see it after the correction is made. But what about the links to that item? And what about RSS readers, who see feeds of original content but not of changes to that content? Because of RSS, should corrections cause new posts that can be seen in feeds?
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