You're looking at what may be the very last vestige of BP's jaw-dropping "Reports from the Gulf." Remember the fun we had with those posts by Paula Kolmar and Tom Seslar, who told us about the ballet of the oil skimmers and the meditative joys of flying over their company's Deepwater Horizon disaster?
Now it's goodbye to all that, with Kolmar's old blog on BP.com reduced to a stray bit of metadata that someone forgot to scrub. As of Thursday, you could still find it tucked into the code for the Beach status page. If you uncover any remnants of Seslar's old blog, send a screengrab, OK?
A BP spokesperson says the company took the reports down at some point this month. She said the press office wasn't able to find out when Kolmar and Seslar's work got the disappearing treatment. But this, supposedly, is why: "Both of them went home and were no longer reporting," she said.
Corexit me if I'm wrong, but I think most websites leave a writer's work in place when that writer moves on -- the long tail and posterity and all. It turns out BP can do a reasonable job of erasing an embarrassing P.R. move. Now if only the company could hit delete on those millions of barrels of oil it dumped into the Gulf of Mexico.
After the jump, BP Press Release Theater.
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Leave a Comment:
a new spin on turning lemons to lemonade
don't know how i feel about this yet... seems like bringing tarballs to your kitchen and releasing all those toxins in your microwave is not a smart move, and seems like what is made from it may carry alot of negative energy that one wouldn't want to wear over her chest; however, i am all for creative expression and happy to see some locals generate income from this extraordinary spill... check this out, rachel:
teenager's website-- http://www.oilcoastjewelry.com
mobile,alabama, news report-- http://wkrg.com/a/920541
Rachel: you should be able to recover the web pages at archive.org, if they were archived correctly. Follow the instructions on the web tab, and I hope you expose them if you find the pages. They have already admitted that they deleted them anyway. Who really thought that BP was going to play fair?
That was my first thought. Unfortunately, if archive.org doesn't post cached pages until they've been properly stored and indexed, which takes a minimum of six to eight months. The thing is, there's also no Google cache of it, only of articles that talk about it and link to it.
So I went to bp.com/robots.txt and, sure enough, there's a list of pages not to be cached. The URL in question isn't on the list that I can see, but looking at archive.org's policies, the mere presence of robots.txt might prevent them from ever caching anything on bp.com. The most recent cache of bp's homepage is Oct 27, 2009.
As for Google, I found a page which claims that Google will automatically remove a page from its cache if that page is changed to a 404 (as the page in question has). Furthermore, Google will not cache a page with a tag in the meta data directing robots not to archive it (which even the 404 page for the blog has).
But all of this is for the individual article link. If anyone has the link to the blog's front page, there's a small chance that there's a cache of that.
I've also tried searching Flickr and Google Images for "bp ballet at sea" hoping that someone might have posted a screengrab already, but... doesn't look like it.
Looks like BP is very good at cleaning up one kind of toxic spillage (and preventing future spills). If only they were nearly as good at doing it with oil...
Links:
http://lifehacker.com/166500/deleting-things-from-googles-cache
http://lifehacker.com/software/google/ask-lifehacker-keep-google-from-caching-my-site-165522.php
http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/conferences/aps/removal-policy.html
http://swampschool.org/tag/paula-kolmar/
perhaps they are now at home writing resumes for their next job!