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January 31, 2006
You can't offer citizen journalists money without causing offence
When a union issues a code of conduct to cover citizen journalists, it is easy to predict the blogosphere's reaction. It does not take long for allegations of protectionism to surface, even when the code asks for citizen journalists to get paid, not offer up legal indemnification and have their material treated properly. That is not to say that the National Union of Journalists code of conduct for what the union calls "witness contributors" does not have its flaws. The term "witness contributors" is just one of them.
For our first off-the-cuff reaction, let's cut to citizen-media advocate Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine. Jarvis's knee-jerk reactions to these things are so common that it's a wonder he hasn't knocked a hole through the desk in front of him by now. His reaction is true to form: it's all about them versus us.
As far as I can tell, the NUJ code seems to boil down to one thing. Media organisations have been paying people for content (aside from letters) for a long time. Just because someone has come up a whizzy new name for a class of contributor doesn't mean they should expect to get nothing in return, their work distorted or landed with a big legal fee. People who do not regard themselves as journalists already get paid for contributions - why should the use of a term end up with them being treated differently?
Conversely, in order to ensure that the media organisations themselves don't get landed with a big legal fee, they should check out wherever possible the authenticity of any contribution. That is my understanding of point two. I can't see how the NUJ will get any media organisations to sign up for the code in the current climate, but you never know - there is always the possibility that a paper or broadcaster is going to come a cropper by using material that has not been checked out, and suddenly discover that something along these lines might have made sense.
The media have already been caught out. It is just that the contributions were not made by people acting under the moniker of "citizen journalist". But fake photographs have been successfully sold or given to the media over many years with predictable results. Piers Morgan wound up running UK hack-trade paper Press Gazette after his former employer, the Daily Mirror, decided to publish fake photos of soldiers abusing prisoners in Iraq that came in from an external source. The pics were more likely to have been taken in the UK with the help of some citizen actors.
Is there a reason why a contribution from someone acting under the banner of citizen journalism should receive less scrutiny than anything else that goes into a paper or broadcast? This is, however, where point three goes off the rails. The use of professional journalists as contributors should not necessarily mean that fact-check mode should get switched off. And this point does make it look like little more than protectionism when Darwinism is perhaps a better approach. Point four asks for payment for contributors: if the work is worth the same money, the people doing it are worth the same consideration.
It is at points like this where I could live without the designation of "citizen journalist" or "witness contributors" in this area. Neither term is very helpful for describing what is likely to be a very broad field. It will extend all the way from what we today call freelancers through to people who happened to have snapped a rising star falling paralytic into a gutter outside a night club on their 3Mpixel cameraphone, and managed to dodge the minder. This is presumably where the bit about not encouraging people to put themselves at "unassessed and inappropriate risk" comes in. That's a wide range - where does the citizen end and the professional begin? Would my use of the tag "citizen" be the only thing that matters?
Emily Bell in Media Guardian argues that the code would tie the hands of the media and leave them vulnerable to a slow death from the pecking of upstarts who eschew journalists for Joe Public. Such organisations would be unable to "experiment with 'wikis' or community-built sites". This is where the NUJ should have been a lot clearer. My reading of the NUJ's code is that it is aimed squarely at people doing traditional publishing, not experimenting with community-involvement sites. I find it hard to believe that anyone at the NUJ had that in mind when drafting this. Maybe they should have and made it clear but I think the link made by Bell in this case is an over-ambitious attempt at a reductio ad absurdum.
Neil McIntosh, also of the Guardian, writes:
The trouble with taking this old rule and applying it to the new world is that it's drawn up for journalists publishing newspapers; a situation where a limited number of people act as gatekeepers to the information, where the addition of bias or inaccuracy can be sensibly monitored.
Yep. I'd say the code is indeed aimed at traditional newsrooms. I think that was deliberate. To try to pretend that anyone believes you should police a forum or a comments area in this way is just ludicrous. But it will clearly be marked out as a user area versus one produced by paid specialists.
There are those in the Web 2.0 crowd who argue that only users should produce media. The time for the old priesthood is gone; the media should simply shut up shop and go do something else. In that case, this code is completely irrelevant. However, this game has not played out yet. What is happening now in terms of trends may not be representative of the long term.
I suspect that, for some time to come, people will be paying, or having people pay on their behalf, for access to news that got checked before it went out on the wires. And there will be room for the user-generated content, as there is already. I think that is the heart of the problem for the NUJ: the media who choose to differentiate by trading immediacy for a willingness to check will have their own codes of conduct. Unless forced to by some future government-appointed press monitor, the situation is too fluid for a union's version to make much headway. However, any such individual code might not be a million miles from this one.
Posted by Chris at 9:17 PM
January 21, 2006
It's official: no zeitgeist to be found at Google
SearchEngineWatch dug out a bunch of documents to do with the attempt by the US Justice Department to obtain a million random URLs generated during the course of a day to try to demonstrate the constitutionality of the Children's Online Protection Act. In the post, Gary Price quotes a sentence from Google's declaration in which the search engine company's counsel argues why Google should not co-operate: "It is against Google's competitive interest to be viewed as completely reflecting the world-wide web."
Think about that sentence for a minute. Not only does Google not reflect the state of the web, it's not even in the company's competitive interest, according to one of its lawyers. It's an interesting position for a search engine with a massive catalogue of websites and which was, until recently, working through a process to digitise and index every book on the planet. Or maybe Google is just concentrating on reflecting the world.
There is plenty more to read over there and the documents show that the "Google backs privacy" meme that is clogging up the blogosphere has less to do with this case than trade-secret protection.
Posted by Chris at 11:18 PM
January 18, 2006
The media comments box stays sealed
After my last post on bloggers' misuse of the word 'conversation', Sean Coon - who wanted AdAge to put comments in with journalists' columns - responded with his reasons for wanting comments to be aired in public and a question of his own:
Why do you think the majority of the mainstream media have dragged their feet in opening their online columns to allow commenting? Simon [Dumenco]'s point about antiquated publishing systems might have something to do with it, but *i feel* that editorial departments, and possibly traditional 'writers' want no part of it.
There are lots of answers to this one. One point I'd like to make first though is that sections of the mainstream media or old media, whatever you want to call them, were quite quick to put discussion forums on their sites to allow people to comment and talk about stories and columns. They were not hugely successful for the most part, which came as a bit of a surprise to a lot of people in the industry.
One assumption that people outside the traditional publishers make is that journalists believe they write copy, which is edited to fit a page, consumed quietly and avidly by a hungry public that nods sagely in response before moving onto the next story. Even the most misguided hack knows otherwise. People comment on stories to themselves at the very least, talk to their friends, colleagues or neighbours about what they saw in the paper - whether it was arrant rubbish, news to them or quite interesting. Forums were meant to cater to that discussion and, theoretically had the spin-off benefit that the more that people hung around the site posting comments, the more ads they could see. Yet, the forums often turned out to be tumbleweed-strewn wildernesses despite the belief that participation should be strong.
Marshall McLuhan wrote about the participation in Understanding Media, published in 1964, just about the time that Douglas Engelbart built the first computer mouse and a year before Ted Nelson came up with the term hypertext (albeit 20 years after Vannevar Bush postulated the Memex). "The individual news item is very low in information, and requires completion or fill-in by the reader...we have discussed the press as a mosaic form successor to the book-form. The mosaic is the mode of the corporate or collective image and commands deep participation. This participation is communal rather than private, inclusive rather than exclusive."
On the one hand, you have bloggers who claim to now feel excluded from the modern press process. On the other, you have the journalists who differ in their opinions in whether they are being exclusive and what to do about it but, deep down, do not feel that much has changed in human nature. Blogging has brought a new mode of expression but it's questionable as to whether the medium has actually changed what people were doing before. Blogging lets people communicate their thoughts on what is in the news to a much wider circle. If your work colleagues or friends do not care all that much about events in Turkey covered today, you can post them on a blog and maybe find someone else who agrees or disagrees. Or just watch the webstats and find out that other people like to read about events in Turkey. In McLuhan's worldview, it marks a further extension of the human, but has it altered what people wanted to do in the first place or just given them a much more efficient way of distributing their thoughts than through a small circle of acquaintances.
But, amid this change, the news media have done nothing, absolutely nothing to stifle the debate. A quick check of Technorati's home page will generally reveal that the top stories and columns under discussion almost always derive directly from the mainstream media. In fact, there are so many places to go one has to question whether the media sites should try to kick-start comment threads on their own pages. If you look at the mags that have them, the comment threads are often lonelier places than external sites.
There are many possible reasons, and a number of them lie in the way that the media sites handle the user interface for comment threads and forums. The software packages are often incompatible with the content management systems used to post news stories, so you force people to jump, which puts them off. But some of the problem is, to my mind, structural. People want to be able to comment off-site so that they can own their part of the debate. Having the comment threads on-page often brings up questions of control and censorship - whatever happens, those threads will be moderated. Off-site, it's up to you.
I shouldn't ignore corporate inertia. Almost every company seems to have a different structure for mediating online and print products, and the IT that powers the website and production systems. A common conversation, no matter what the structure is, goes like this:
Editor - "We really need X for our site."Person in charge of the infrastructure - "The public don't want X."
End of conversation.
I once worked in a place where the people in charge of the websites were ex-editorial but had IT responsibilities. The search function was badly messed up - to the point that we advised people to use the site-search option under Google rather than attempt to use the on-site search. Questions about why repairing the archive search was not a priority, or at least making it possible to put a Google button on the site as a competitor had done, were met with the bald response: "People don't use search for news." This was some time before Google News happened along, but I think even recent visitors from the planet Zarg might have been baffled by the response from the people in charge of running the website. The real answer was, of course, they knew it was messed-up but they did not know what to do about it, even though it was possible to come up with a business case as to why effective search was important to the site.
For adding something like comment threads to stories and columns, the business case is less clear. Editors, even if they think adding the threading software makes sense editorially, will find themselves beating their heads against a brick wall if the people in charge of the site software do not agree. And I think the business case for having comments on-page is so intangible that few would want to push it through - there are so many other things you can go after that could bring in more readers. Don't forget, each and every blog post brings in more traffic. By sending people away - albeit by default - traffic is still turning up at the door.
The issue then becomes the one of the feeling of exclusion that bloggers complain of. But do you need on-page comments from the writers, or simply a way of debating points with them? You can see that happening with a number of journalists already, using either blogs on the magazine sites or their own. More will follow if they see a benefit to the process. However, I think any sensible media organisation will do what it can to move where this market is headed rather than try to play catch-up with blogs as they are today. Second-generation intermediaries - the companies that follow Technorati - are likely to be able to bring together the sources of debate and the commenters more efficiently than is possible today.
Posted by Chris at 9:06 PM | Comments (4)
January 17, 2006
Speak up or the bloggers won't listen to you
It was inevitable that a column that described blogging as nothing special in the world of writing should open up a further bout of collective self-delusion by much of the blogging community. With a smattering of exceptions, such as Adrants, bloggers ganged up on AdAge columnist Simon Dumenco: giving him the same message many times over, that blogging is different.
How is blogging different? Why it's the conversation, they argue; it's all about the dialogue (I put the links in at the bottom to make the post easier to read). The blogging = conversation assertion stands alone as the greatest of the lies of blogging. I fail to understand why the word has stuck like a leech to this particular invention of the late 20th Century. It has reached the level where people complain about having to email and then post a blog entry because a particular site does not have comments on the same page as the article. Ask yourself, are those people after a conversation - something that can be carried out using email as well as any other two-way medium - or something else? And if it is something else, why do bloggers persist in the use of the word "conversation", other than the word gets top billing in the Cluetrain Manifesto?
In fact, blogging offers a way of avoiding conversation without offence; a method for forming apparent social connections without actually engaging with people directly. People only occasionally get worked up about bloggers not responding to comments or making corrections based on comments. If someone ignores emails, the other party is likely to get a lot more annoyed than if a comment goes unremarked on a blog. That's the thing about conversations - they demand the active participation of at least two parties. A lot of blog conservations are pretty much one-way affairs. The blogger posts something, people comment - often pointing out errors - and the blogger has disappeared, having moved onto the next post. How does this function as conversation? It does not. But it does function as debate. Why are commenters so insistent on having their opinions published if they do not believe they are engaged in a public debate or forum? Why is a private email or phone conversation not good enough? Because those people are trying to convince an audience of their position: that is surely the characteristic of a debate, not a conversation.
The distinction might seem to be pedantic. You could argue that conversation as a word is close enough to what is going on in blogging. Other words have been given bigger twists than this. But it ill serves a community to lecture commentators who are not part of the club on what blogging is or isn't when that community cannot be honest or analytical enough to understand the process in which it is engaged.
As to Dumenco's headline about blogger being a cooler name: just wait until the fashion cycle rolls round and the name is as chic as parachute pants, I guess we'll be seeing a lot more 'writers' online.
The conversationalists:
Ad Age Says There Is No Such Things as Blogging..But The Name Is Cool
Blogging Isn't Just Writing, It's a Dialogue
Bloggers Should Explain Blogging Technology
Blogs are (public) conversations, almost like a giant party - This post at least emphasises the public nature of commenting versus emailing.
Posted by Chris at 10:44 PM | Comments (8)
January 8, 2006
Wake me up when Google buys Dell
PR Steve Rubel has accused hacks of sleeping on the job, especially at weekends. Well, they probably were, but the stories he points to are not things to get you out of bed and on the horn to the senior flacks at Dell and Google over your Saturday bacon and eggs.
So, what did they not do? Just what is the collective laziness of the MSM keeping from you? Well, at the end of last week, apparently, Dell started shipping PCs with a slightly modified browser setup. The change was that Dell decided to make the default home page for browsers installed on its home PCs an iGoogle page designed for Dell customers. At the same time, Dell had installed Google Desktop. Now, there are a number of things that have happened recently that make me wonder whether we have fallen through a hole in time and we are re-running the mid-1990s. This is one of them.
For more than ten years, browser suppliers, portals and search engine providers have been convincing - or just paying - PC makers to make their wares the first thing the punter sees when they plug in their shiny new hardware and try to fire up the interweb. Since then, these deals make the news on occasion. But that is generally only when there is an indication that the deal actually changes the business dynamics of the hardware or software industries. For example, Opera's shift to shipping a free browser was made possible, in part, by sponsorship from Google. That was a change in business dynamics. But, even then, the Google involvement was a small part of the overall story.
Google hosts the web page for Dell owners on a part of the Google site designed for customised web page - not an expensive move, I suspect. That, for me, does not indicate much of a shift in how either Dell or Google goes about its business. You could make an argument for it being a finger in the eye for Microsoft - but is that a vital part of a more important story or just some commentary on the fluid nature of Internet-related deals?
Google is a hot company right now, so there is an argument for running just about any story on the deals it makes. But I think with this one, any news editor would want to know that there is more to it - if there is anything unusual about the deal - before committing someone to that story. Otherwise, it's just "PC maker tweaks software bundle". Whoop. De. Doo.
Rubel went further to admonish the PRs at those companies for not fast-tracking a release on what they just did through the approvals process. Even if there was a release prior to this change, would anybody have cared enough to do more than edit it and post it? The chances are that neither Dell nor Google planned to produce a press release. Neither company is so profligate with releases that a deal of this nature would result in one.
Could the media have 'scooped' this story? Unless hacks bought a Dell PC every week or rang Dell up every few days to ask "have you changed the software bundle?", it seems not. The general public will have one over the news media every time on stories like this because people external to the company can provide the most timely information. If they are bloggers, they will blog it. No matter what day of the week it is. If PRs think hacks are going to chase their tails on this kind of story, they need to think again. Quickly.
Posted by Chris at 7:57 PM
January 6, 2006
Embossed gold lettering is tough to sell on electronic paper
To get the price of ebook readers so that they will fly off the shelves of shops and supermarkets, a cellphone or games console-like subsidy model might help. The subsidy approach is something that Irex Technologies will concentrate on - albeit not for the mass market. Irex is aiming at specialist publishers who sell subscriptions worth hundreds or thousands of dollars a year to drive initial sales. Patent services, scientific publishers and financial specialists would seem to be good candidates. Maybe technical manuals for maintenance staff will make more sense on such an ebook than on paper or a laptop.
However, it will not take long for a company such as Irex to run out of potential customers. A long-term viable market means breaking away from any form of subsidy model. For the mass market, such a model will rely on digital rights management (DRM) and it's hard to see any DRM working for the printed word where there is so much resistance to it already in audio and video. If you can see it or hear it, you can rip it despite the intense efforts of content suppliers to make hardware makers slap intrusive electronic controls on their devices.
If you cannot make people pay money every time they switch the thing on - and that's what you need to support mass-market subsidies, then the subsidy model is a non-starter. I suspect that, even if the DRM worked as its creators hoped and proved tough to crack, people would still prefer to buy non-subsidised readers as this would give them so many more reading choices. After all, who buys a DVD player that cannot be set to play DVDs from any region when given the choice?
In this scenario, copying material is trivially easy and something that will happen day in, day out. New authors will positively encourage it, embracing the Cory Doctorow doctrine that obscurity is worse than royalty protection. Mainstream publishers will argue they have the cream of the authors, but they will find it hard to justify paper-novel pricing for their biggest moneyspinners: the bonkbusting bestsellers. The ones with the gold lettering piled high at airport bookshops. These are not books people want to keep: they read them on holiday or just on the way to a holiday, then toss them because they are too heavy to bring back. One ebook means a whole pile of over-thick pulp. Disposability will equal cheap in the minds of most consumers with margins set to plummet as a result - books are not that expensive to print. The cost to publishers largely lies in the risk of commissioning, editing and then printing up a big pile of turkeys that don't even fly out of $1.99 bargain bins.
Vanity is the thing that the publishers will end up focusing on, unless they can find a way to profitably nurture popular bestsellers and get decent money without the authors just doing it for themselves. Not vanity publishing: that will have been killed off almost by the ebook revolution. This is vanity in terms of the books that people like to be seen to have read. Even if they haven't. Devotees of Irish satirist Flann O'Brien will recall the service offered to the nervous socialite of writing insightful margin notes into thick, leather-bound volumes. The books that people will continue to buy, and pay big money will be those not just for reading - if at all - but those to be displayed on a shelf. I'm not sure how you get to collect first editions of new writers in this scenario but I'm sure someone will think of a way: maybe that will be the new vanity publishing: "This one's got great reviews. Quick! Get a couple of hundred knocked up down the printers and make sure they get signed."
Posted by Chris at 10:47 PM
Bye bye print
As a primarily print journalist, one question I often get asked is how long do newspapers and magazines have left? I have given the same answer for the last ten years: as long as it takes to get an electronic reader with the visual quality of paper, that weighs no more than a thin paperback, with the battery life of an alarm clock and costs tens of dollars to buy. Actually, the battery life can come down a bit: a couple of weeks is just dandy, thank you. When all those things come together, you have the effective death of mass-produced print. It's difficult to think of any reason why you would not use an electronic reader over paper with those features other than stubbornness or vanity. However, vanity is powerful motivator, so I give books - some of them at least - a much longer lifespan.
Printed paper is no more than a distribution mechanism. As Mark Cuban pointed out, it is a distribution mechanism that is becoming prohibitively expensive compared with the alternative: electronic distribution. I disagree: print has always been expensive. It just happened to be cheaper than hiring town criers or minstrels to spread your words. Oddly, printing and distributing paper media has never been cheaper (well, barring some rises in paper costs recently). Go into a bookstore like Borders and just look at the racks and racks of mags. Many of them come from small independent operations, not just big publishers with deep pockets.
Individual circulations might be declining in a number of cases, but the number of titles remains higher than 20 years ago. Maybe even 10 years ago. Some news magazines have seen circulations climb, not fall, at the expense of other titles. However, the main gainer has been online news - not a big surprise. There are many bloggers who believe this shift provides an opportunity to remake the newspaper in their own image - that the change in distribution mechanism provides an opportunity to throw out the old ways of researching and publishing stories.
For printed newspapers, brand loyalty is important. That's how you get the money. People buy your paper everyday because, in the main, they like it more than the other ones out there. With a big enough circulation, you get advertising. And everybody's happy. Online, there is no brand loyalty. Just the stories that look interesting at the time. This makes getting serious money for your product a whole lot more difficult. This is why Cuban and others suffer "an onslaught of ads, popups and intrusions". Each one is cheap: having a lot might just pay for your staff, if you're lucky. It's no surprise to find that publishers are happy to continue working in print when the trend is towards online. It might be a decline, but it can be profitable, managed decline if they play their cards right. If not, you just lost a good newspaper and wound up with a collection of old press releases.
Personally, I reckon there will be a split in online publishing. Newspapers and mags that survive the transition best will disappear behind payment screens and only a fraction will make the necessary leap. These will be operations that can break their own stories. The others will sit in a ring around these and will be mixtures of blog and mag, in various proportions. They are those that can live off Adsense and its successors.
The effect on the book market, however, might be even more dramatic.
Posted by Chris at 10:09 PM
Ebooks: not quite déjà vu all over again
My favourite comment from Gizmodo's coverage of Sony's e-book reader, launched this week at CES, was Tom of MusicThing's "Yay EBooks! Party like it's 1999!". And 1989, for that matter - anybody remember VC Hermann Hauser's Active Book? The design mutated into the EO tablet computer before the whole project disappeared along with Microsoft's first tablet efforts and as Apple's more famous Newton PDA flamed out. But the e-book reader is one of those concepts that just won't lie down and die.
It is not so much that the ebook reader has suddenly, and once again, become an attractive proposition in and of itself: the story is all in the display and what that means for what could be one of the highest volume niches in portable computing. Companies have been striving to find a killer appplication for handheld computers and keep coming up short. It's not just because a lot of the software sucks. They have lacked the two major requirements in any device that seeks to replace paper: the ability to run off a couple of AAA cells or maybe even coin cells not just for hours but for weeks; and a display that does not make your eyes water after a couple of hours.
The story is really about electronic paper: a display that keeps everything visible even when the power has been turned off. That makes for dramatic improvements in battery life for the computer behind the display. It only has to wake up to do the equivalent of a page turn. It can then have a good long snooze, with the merest trickle of battery keeping a clock going or to sniff the airwaves to look for any updates for content you have downloaded. The designs of the 1990s only had liquid crystal displays (LCDs) to work with. They would get no battery life advantage over other handhelds and the contrast ratio was nothing like paper: a non-starter in an environment where displays are still too tiring to read for any length of time.
In the latest crop of products, electronic paper looks as though it might finally be viable in mass-production devices, at least from a reliability and readability standpoint. There is still some way to go before the displays genuinely rival paper, but it is now possible to see a path from where ebook readers go from being curiosities to the one device everybody uses.
At several hundred dollars, Sony's reader is way too expensive for the market the company expects it to serve. But, this is the wild and wacky world of electronic gadgets. This is largely a concept design that is only just about ready to make it as a niche product that a few will fork over several hundred dollars, or rather, 40 000 yen to get hold of. In the Netherlands, a Philips spinout, Irex Technologies, has a more or less equivalent design that the company has decided to aim at business users - namely subscribers to expensive information services. Those early adopters might be enough to give display makers such as E Ink the necessary experience with mass production to start bringing down costs to where people will think, "what the hell, I'll get one".
I don't see a price north of $50 being viable for an ebook reader if these things are to ship millions a year. This is not an all-singing, all-dancing PDA-phone that can command anywhere near a higher cost, and as I argue in another post, there is no subsidy model for an ebook reader long-term, or even medium-term. But the nature of the electronics inside one of these things should make a sub-$50 price target, even sub-$20, possible quite quickly as long as there are no gotchas in the large-scale production of the display technology. The device could well piggyback off a phone for Internet access and other more complex functions. The ebook reader does not need a lot inside it. But the display has got to look right, it has got to be light and it has got to be cheap.
That's the good news. The bad? It depends on your perspective. There are many people who regard newspapers as no more than "dinosaur blogs". This is the device that will put the lid on the coffin of print, an argument I've been making for what must be ten years now. For those who want to see print newspapers wiped from the face of the planet, this is your dream machine. But, anyone planning to get rich off a bestseller should find themselves an advance and a publisher pronto.
Posted by Chris at 8:42 PM
January 3, 2006
Google pollution
Om Malik reckons that the geeks are taking over Google. To soak up that quiet time before 2006 really gets going - it looks as though the working 2006 has been postponed to the 4th if out of office replies from the UK are anything to go by - he recommends googling on common first names.
Try Paul, and soon after Paul McCartney you get Paul Graham. The number three entry under Robert is, naturally, Robert Scoble. I tried Chris and Chris Pirillo came out top. Check out the backlinks and soon the reason becomes pretty clear. All of the people cited by Malik are bloggers. Graham's site does not use a conventional blog structure but it's close enough for jazz. It's not so much that geeks are inheriting Google but that famous - that is, heavily linked - bloggers geeks are encroaching on the top pages. Try Jeff and Jeff Jarvis appears at number two.
What do bloggers do? They link to stuff, and mostly other bloggers. I think I packed five such links into the last two paragraphs, so I've done my bit for their already inflated pagerank. Malik's post is only a bit of fun but it does some problems with the Google's results and the disproportionate visibility of blogs.
One is the common belief that Google is some sort of guide to the zeitgeist. Google's creators made a sensible decision to use pagerank to order search results. Citation is, for the most part, a good way of showing how important a piece of information is. It is, also, highly vulnerable to gaming, which is why splogs have been so successful at polluting Google's results. Successive tweaks to the pagerank algorithms deal with the worst abuses as they appear. But there will always be some pollution with a system that depends largely on people "playing by the rules".
The bloggers themselves have unwittingly - and on occasions deliberately - gamed the system by being so profligate with links and made it look as though bloggers are the only community with a voice on the Internet. That is a situation that cries out for a major tweak to the result-ordering algorithms before everyone starts believing that bloggers are genuinely representative of the world population. However, Google has to weigh up whether demoting blogs works for its interests: who else is going to carry Adsense content for the company?
Posted by Chris at 10:43 PM
