Category: Metablog

It’s probably fair to say that there is an element of the online population who feel that the recent explosion of weblogs and the publicity it has recieved is undue. Furthermore, it has emerged that All Webloggers Are Teenage Girls.

Well, Most of them.

Well, Most of them that live in poland.

Well, most of them that live in poland and filled out the survay.

I was going to start this article as “There are two types of weblogs in this world” and divide the world into Them (The webloggers who are, as Andrew carefully and elequently describes, a bunch of sixteen year old pop-idol fans gazing at their navels whilst describing how great the macaroni and cheese they had for dinner last night was) verses Us (The cool, level headed Webloggers, who discuss new W3C standards and the direction of them; the future of weblogging; the whys and wherefores of XML development and such), before I did something that stopped me doing this. I read my archives. So I ask this instead:

What is a weblog?

It’s a collection of articles displayed in descending chronological order on the front page, normally archived by month or week. Easy. Does that stop FTrain being a kind of weblog? Not really. Does that make The Register a weblog? Probably not. So, we have these weblog things, where we can safely define Weblogs as “Something I think is a weblog”, and that’s about it. This means that you can make something a weblog by putting it on the web and saying “This is a weblog”, and since weblogs are currently Cool, an awful lot of people are putting things online and calling them weblogs.

Saying that all webloggers act like 12 year olds is rougly equivilent to saying that “All journalists are no-talent hacks with the integrity of a ball of water”. Andrew Orlowski saying that blogs are a waste of bandwidth is roughly equivlant to the classic “All Greeks Are Liars” argument, since his irregular columns are mostly a rant three folds long about whatever is on his mind at the time. But I digress, for this isn’t about attacking Andrew Orlowski.

So, ninty percent of weblogs are crap, depending on how you define weblog.

So far, so normal. Ninty percent of everything is crap. There is still the 10%, there are still people like Stavros, BB, Mark, CavLec et. al. who make wading though the rest of it worth it.

One day I’ll submit something like this to The Register to see if they print it. I doubt it.

Andrew Orlowski at The Register is continuing his rabidly anti-blog stance with an article today on Google’s possible creation of a Blog tab to go along with the images, news and groups tabs. This follows the pattern that groups matched, that of buying the company and using the data to provide a separate meta-data enriched search system.

There are plus points of this idea, from the separation of mindless-link-propagation which can effectively bomb or repaint a search result, though to the idea that searching for anything will get you the site, rather than a tonne of blogs talking about it first.

And here is the rub. I’d agree with this decontamination of Google’s database if I could find effective and conclusive evidence that the database was contaminated to start with. If I search for “Domino’s” I get Pizza and Games. If I search for “I Hate Domino’s” I get two message boards and my own blog (Where someone in comments said that phrase), because the first term is a thing, so you get matches of the things, and the second is an opinion, so you get opinions. The idea of a -blogs option if you don’t want blogs is one thing, but removing the data they give Google is something else.

Second is the separation of blogs from the results, meaning you could just search blogs. This would be useful, the ability to use the entire blogsphere as a kind of eopinions site. But you can now.

Third is also the separation of blogs from the results. First, how do you draw the line? Do you match every url against the blogger database, and if it matches it’s a blog? What about MT, Greymatter, Vellum, Epistula, Blosxom, Radio users? What about Zeldman and Murky and the other sites that are hand-coded? How do you tell if they are Weblogs?

What about the sites that use Blogger for news? How do you tell they aren’t weblogs?

But most of all, this hurts me as a person. My online identity is based around Aquarionics and weblogs who have mentioned Aquarionics. If you search for my name, you will find the fact I defined a specification (Admittedly, it was ESF), you will find that I’m generally not-disliked, and that I have spent the last almost three and a half years writing a weblog, and developing the software that runs it. If you take blogs out of Google’s equation, I vanish.