Morning Wed 7th April
Should I look at my efforts at regular blogging, linking and setting up feeds in the light of O’Reilly’s explanation of the power of the blog to influence search engine rankings as a result of linking and referencing frequency.
“because the blogging community is so highly self-referential, bloggers paying attention to other bloggers magnifies their visibility and power … If it were merely an amplifier, blogging would be uninteresting. But like Wikipedia, blogging harnesses collective intelligence as a kind of filter.”
Like others, I had concluded that endless self-referencing across tweets and blogs simply engaged individuals in mindless international “echoing”, but that the filtering and trending aspect was useful. I have been accepting the technology at ‘face value’. When implications are more fully explored, it is sobering to know that search engine results may be skewed by blog feeds’ creating identifiable ‘trends’. Do results really represent a balanced aggregation? Are results valid or just popular? Do they represent all appropriate answers or only those answers that are both popular and appropriate? Views from the participating ‘tail end’ surface, but the technology and information literacy divide must still inhibit the views of many. Web 2.0’s collaborative structure, more so than Web 1.0’s fixed presentation style, may offer the promise of digital democracy, but it is flawed too.
By committing my incomplete thoughts to the blogosphere, am I contributing to trends and erroneous research leads. A sociologist’s dream; not quite a librarian’s dream.
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