David blogs at Barista.
Statistics programs are the secret drug of the blog world. I tell my friends how to load them with the insouciance of a street dealer, knowing that the first oneâs freeâ¦
They are addictive partly because they never tell us what we need to know, since the numbers themselves are unreliable indicators of behaviour. I end up walking the dog at night making faux deductions in my head, but nothing ever really adds up.
The blogosphere is like a condensing solar system. Various gas giants are forming, created by the gravity of public attention inspired by current affairs and politics. I suspect there are lighter planets with special interest cores – everything from religion to knitting, pets, zydeco and food. At the moment, space is full of wandering moons, orbiting each other, sharing lives, small moments and photos. Domestic, decent, and communal.
But the sky is also full of the most wonderful asteroids, floating by themselves, which glow their own strange mental power, sustained by little but hope and pleasure. They too may look political, or obsessive, or extensions of esoteric studies, but they are essentially individual. Through a telescope, a planet is an even sphere. An asteroid is gnarled and lumpy, like an interstellar spud.
In this metaphor, Barista is a King Edward, a tasty old variety beloved of Anglo-saxons, obtainable at your favourite inner city market by the kilo in a paper bag. I suspect that most of the blogs on my linklist can be found in the same stall. As you know from my links, they do fabulous work, displaying talent that would sit well in any major magazine, if the authors didnât have other lives.
The big question is: how do we get attention? I think the situation is getting worse. I get pretty reasonable traffic from google, but most of it comes through images, not text. It shows me that the right images, connected to the subject of the site can be a powerful way of attracting interested people. For me, the clicks are mostly irrelevant.
I did a small experiment with the term âAustralian Centre for the Moving Imageâ?, about which Iâve written three times in the last few months. I canât find the posts on google, though I gave up after the first twelve screens, at a barrier created by dead rubbish from catalogues and promo sites.
As soon as I went for the blog button, my recent ACMI post is right at the top, even though the reference is buried in the text. It reminds me that I need to cite highly specific keywords, because the other two posts arenât there.
Two years ago, Barista would be on the front page of a general search for ACMI. Now, you can only find it if you deliberately search for opinion from the blogosphere. This is not a simple one-click operation. Either you a) put up a term, b) donât find what you want, c) go to the âmoreâ? button at the top, d) click on it to reveal a whole list, e) find the âblog searchâ? category, f) retype your search because it has been removed and g) search the list of blogs. Or, if you are savvy, you a) put up a term, b) donât find what you want, c) click on news – intuitive, huh? – and d) find the âsearch blogsâ? button at the bottom of the page and e) search the list of blogs. At least it doesnât wipe the text in this pathway.
Iâve said it before, but I am getting more evidence. Google treats the blogosphere like shit. Thereâs twenty million of us, and we deserve more respect. It is not beyond the wit of a corporation capitalised at an estimated $US330 billion to put a link to blogs up next to the ânewsâ? button.
I think we are being used in two ways. For a while, we cluttered the search engine and encouraged commercial users to buy ads. When we became too messy, and google had started a meme for the ad behaviour, they dumped us. Now, google owns its own blogspot, and my bet is they are constructing a way of privileging it – perhaps by setting up a good search system inside Blogger itself. They already have that irritating system of names for comments.
Effectively, we are becoming a giant walled garden. The system encourages conversation inside the blogosphere, which is valuable in itself. Many Barista posts are specifically about that, including this one. But we also want to contribute to the general debate.
If you google âclimate changeâ?, for instance, you donât find a single blog about the topic until page six, where you will find Andrew Bartlett, the Democrat Senator. Good on Andrew, and this is an interesting symbol of the fusion between the blogosphere and national politics. But where is Deltoid? Google the title and you will find Tim Lambert half way down page two. Google his name, and you donât find his current site till the bottom of page one. The general âScienceBlogs/Seed Magazineâ? strategy hasnât helped.
Perhaps we should be consoled by the fact that the denialist crap has largely been chased away too.
Am I right to complain? Maybe not, but it does seem as though the search engine system is now structured to prevent the blogosphere from intervening in the general social debate. Any illusions perpetrated by our more grandiose brethren are firmly quashed. To go back to my first trash metaphor, you have to land an opinion on a gas giant, whose surface is now littered with the wreckage of old spacecraft built exactly for this purpose.
If you are lucky, your opinion is carried off by an astronaut – a journalist. Once more they are the heroes of our solar system, trawling the skies for stuff to pump into teh big media starships.
Did you want it like that?
This is a thoughtful and frightening post David, thanks.
Thomas Friedman once asked “Is Google God?”. I must be an athiest. I don’t believe in it. I just follow the links from the blogs I like to the blogs I might like.
Thanks David for conforming a hunch.
I’ve noticed googling recipes that blogs have been given the short shrift, whereas before it was more balanced. 7 pages of creme caramel recipes to get to this piece of bloggy magnificence. Number one is the agglomeration of can-driven 50′s style recipes that is cooks.com.
Not sexpecting that blogger get a taste algorithm, but as you say, exclusion leads to the pedestrain results that drove us to blogs in the first place.
As a blogger and a searcher, I’ve always been a little annoyed at all the useless blog posts that came up whenever I was searching for something. I’m not sure if that’s a function of my own searching strategies, given that I’m usually looking for primary sources and facts, rather than opinions, but I’m sure I’m not alone in this particular frustration.
I actually think that Google is striking a better balance these days between blogs and other sites when it comes to search results. The interlinking between blogs (most of whom say exactly the same thing, and add nothing new to the conversation) has always been the Achilles Heel of Google’s ranking algorithm. But plenty of people still manage to stumble across my (small and infrequently linked to) blog from Google searches on all sorts of things, so I’d hardly say it’s a complete failure (I’m the top result for a couple of improbable terms).
I’d quite like Google to prominently note whether something is a blog posting, or a MSM article, or similar. That way I’d decide to visit depending on what sort of material I’m looking for. Sometimes you want to get engaged in a conversation that includes all sorts of opinions, informed or otherwise. Sometimes, you want just the facts, ma’am.
There’s a search engine called Clusty which clusters results and makes it a bit easier to search the web, or just blogs (but not the web without blogs).
http://www.clusty.com
Bear in mind there are over 50 million blogs indexed by Technorati now. That’s a lot of blog results, a hell of a lot more carefully placed keywords jostling for legroom.
I am horrified, for my part, at how often one of my posts, named ineptly after the title of one of John Marsden’s books, comes up as a google search, and want to take this opportunity to publicly apologise to all the searchers who have been led there in the vain hope of obtaining a synopsis.
It’s also rather scary how much apposite search traffic one can attract if one tends to think in lyric quotations when composing post titles. I have a head full of the things…someone please cure me. David, try googling an organisation plus a carefully chosen keyword from your posts, and see how you get on. Funny that you are getting results from images, as indexing spiders don’t see them.