Elliott C. Back: Technology FTW!

Diversity in Blogging (Again)

Posted in Blogging by Elliott Back on April 2nd, 2005.

Remember the big fuss about diversity and classism in blogging? Take a look at this entry on the Wordpress scandal. In her article, Suw quotes:

Quoting Matt and Jonas makes sense: they’re both lead Wordpress developers. Quoting Shelley’s summary and overview of the article is reasonable, but there are many other excellent summaries of the scandal available. Why quote Shelley, an already noted blogger? And, why quote Kottke’s three lines on nothings on the subject?

In my mind, quoting an article like what Shelley wrote, informative, thoughtful, is fine, even though it comes from a high-ranking source and doesn’t do much for the diversity of your post. But, quoting Kottke just to quote an A-lister? That’s classist! Why not quote this guy who says:

Well, whatever - there are a lot worse crimes on the planet but it’s a rather large blow for Wordpress to be caught in such an embarassing situation.

That’s at least as quotable as Kottke’s “contributing to spam noise on the web is annoying.” When all you listen to is the A crowd on the blogosphere, you’re not going to get any diversity of opinion or good ideas. And, you might end up recycling disguised crap because you assume everything written by a guy on the Top 100 is pure gold.

A sidenote:

This has nothing to do with Suw’s blog, and I’m not against linking to A-list folks with discretion. I just thought it was interesting that a random article I came across–which is full of great, original content–links exclusively to big bloggers, with the exception of some friends she talked to. I can’t come up with a solution, but this just an example of the A-list linking “problem.” In fact, Suw gives a good criticism of the effects of web popularity in one of her older posts. Go read it, it’s better than this one.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 2nd, 2005 at 4:49 pm and is tagged with author shelley, jonas luster, web popularity, embarassing situation, classist, suw, pure gold, sidenote, random article, blogosphere, lister, blogger, bloggers, scandal, discretion, crimes, diversity, crap, fuss, crowd. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

Viewing 20 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    It's her blog, why do you care?
    • ^
    • v
    so boy wonder, what's next; fightin crime?
    • ^
    • v
    I'm afraid I'm really not entirely sure what your point is here. Ok, so I could have not bothered with the Kottke link and it wouldn't have made much difference, but as I was talking about his micropatronage scheme later on, it made sense to link to him.

    I also linked to the best site I could find for Saul Albert, and to two of Javier Candeira's sites - neither of those are 'A-List' bloggers. I linked to my personal blog, which is also not A-List, and Hugh Macleod who, although he is A-List, is the source of the idea I quoted, so that's fair game.

    My links are always relevant to the topic at hand, not picked because of the status of the blogger. When I am linking to the A-List, it's for a good reason, e.g. pushing back at them (Doc Searls) or because they've got data no one else has (Dave Sifry) or because they were at an event I was at (Robert Scoble, Tim Bray).

    I'm not a heavy linker like Doc Searls or Glenn Reynolds - most of what I write is completely original or developing an idea someone else has had. if you think that the post about Wordpress is 'recycling disguised crap' then you obviously didn't read all of it, because most of it was an original take on a problem wider than Wordpress's faux pas.

    I understand that you may be feeling frustrated at the apparently inexplicable success of some of the A-Listers, but taking random pot-shots at people (and for the record, I definitely do not count as an A-Lister) for imagined slights is not going to win you any fans.
    • ^
    • v
    And you just perpetuated the A-List by linking to them.

    Curses! Foiled again!
    • ^
    • v
    Suw, my point is just that I can surf the web and encounter a classist blog hierarchy, at random. Your entry is great on its own merits: my discussion just hinges on the selection of your links about the WP.org controversy.

    Obviously, the status of a blogger (should) be correlated to the quality of his content, or his original ideas, or some other thing about him that everyone likes. Therefore, when you or I link to him, it's usually for a good reason. The only problem is that there are also other great sources out there, that no one finds, because they live in the shadow of the more well known blogs who have also commented on the same issue.

    When I write "you" in my post, I am writing to the general reader. Unfortunately, when you (Suw) read the post, its easy to misread my general admonition about reposting gargage as a critisicm of your post. I really liked your post--I just found the distribution of links interesting.
    • ^
    • v
    Popularity has nothing to do with either 'reporting the facts' or really having some good insights. There is also the old problem of 'group think' (joining some popular opinion, because you can't be bothered to have your own) or 'follow the leader' (wrong placed loyalty just because an external 'enemy' threatens the internal consent of the groups identity).

    A-list rarly works in terms of 'enlightenment'.
    • ^
    • v
    I think that the WP.org controversy is a good example of "Follow the leader." WP people circle their wagons to prevent even a discussion of the events that took place ...
    • ^
    • v
    Elliott: I really appreciated the point of this post, even if it ruffled some feathers. The truth is that if you cited the issue of bloggers automatically linking to A-Listers WITHOUT giving an example, you would have been reamed for lack of citation and being a pussy. Suw was just the unlucky example I guess. And I thought it was clear that you admired the original content in the post.

    As Lisa Stone and I plan our BlogHer conference for this summer we are continually reiterating the same point: it's not a problem of heinous conscious bias...it's more a problem that it's hard to search around a topic without being inundated with the same 10 posts from the same 10 A-listers on the subject. These are the links you will find at the top of Google or on Page 1 of Technorati and so on. Yes you, or I, or many of your readers might dig a little deeper and strike that content gold that we all know is out there..,but it is surprisingly difficult. Just do a Technorati search on your own URL and see if it's not missing at least a dozen links you know are out there...from blogs written using iBlog and for a myriad of other inexplicable reasons that Technorati cannot seem to explain or address.

    As long as blog search tools are subpar and biased toward limited link love rather than even traffic, let alone content quality, then I do think it's a worthy goal to cite your favorite lesser-known sources.

    What's wrong with suggesting that?
    • ^
    • v
    Elisa, if we are missing links to you, let me know so I can check we are spidering them OK. Email me directly at kmarks@technorati.com, and I can investigate for you. We want to be a comprehansive index to serve you better.
    You can use the direct ping form to make sure we index a blog that points to you but neglects to send out updates.
    Also, by default Technorati sorts results by timeliness, not Authority, so what you should see are the most recent links to your blog or post, not the 'A list'.
    • ^
    • v
    One problem with looking around in Technorati, though, is that each result also shows the popularity of the author, and to be honest, the ones that read "1000000 links from even more sources" are more likely to get read.
    • ^
    • v
    How 'bout a trackback next time you quote me, dude?

    Thanks!

    Elliott: That's what pingback is for
    • ^
    • v
    Well, that's overall an old problem: quantity is easier measured then quality. And especially in writing/reporting quality itself is hard to judge and often a very personal thing as well.

    Most A-List people of the blogosphere are writing about the blogosphere itself. Something I find highly boring. The other more prominent A-list bloggies write about american politics. Another boring topic. So? There are hardly and A-list blogs apart from fansites (Miss Spears), games (w00t!) and porn left.

    Fark, slashdot, MeFi and BoingBoing are mostly link blogs with additional comments - but feature rarly any real unique content.

    Even such great sites/blogs like Art & Letters Daily hardly get any coverage at all.

    So where is the good content in the blogosphere apart from commentaries, news and link recycling? Or is that all that there is about blogging?
    • ^
    • v
    Trackback is the blogger who is citing's responsibility.

    Pingback makes it the original blogger's problem to monitor who is using their entries. It was invented to cover the butts of bloggers who are too lazy to perform the common courtesy to trackback the blog they're quoting from.

    If you're going to use someone's stuff, at least have the courtesy to let them know.
    • ^
    • v
    Actually, disregard that comment - I'm just pissed because pingback in WP 1.5 seems to be borked.
    • ^
    • v
    Lol... awwwww. I hope you get it working again! BTW, here's something from the intro to the pingback spec:

    Pingback is a method for web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. Typically, web publishing software will automatically inform the relevant parties on behalf of the user, allowing for the possibility of automatically creating links to referring documents.
    • ^
    • v
    Thanks..no dice yet.

    Yeah, I read the pingback spec. The opening sentence there that you quoted is totally ludicrous. I, as the author being quoted let's say, do not 'request notification when somebody links to [one] of [my] documents'.

    Rather, I passively activate the 'allow pingbacks' function on my blog (if it has that function) and hope that the rest of the world:

    a. is using blogware that has outgoing pingback capability, and
    b. has it turned on.

    I laughed when I read that - clearly the author is writing in the future...a future when EVERYONE has pingback (in and out) enabled. It certainly isn't the case today.
    • ^
    • v
    Whoa...your pingback machine went nuts. I received 24 pingbacks from this post today...

    Upgrade recently?
    • ^
    • v
    That's a little weird, I have to say. No software was upgraded today.
    • ^
    • v
    It's still continuing. I'm getting a pingback from this article about every 20 minutes or so.

    I'm starting to smell something wrong with Technorati because I'm starting to get multiple pingbacks from other blogs as well....

    I'll look into it.
    • ^
    • v
    Yeees.....it's my Kramer plugin for WP. It's freaking out :)

    J
 

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