Can Blogs Help Save The Web?

January 16, 2004 | 9 Comments

This week I’ve been thinking about how blogs bring value to the Web as a whole, if at all, and came up with the thought that maybe blogs and blogging technology are what finally bring the Web up to it’s most useful potential. This may be a bit of a ramble, so bear with me. Let’s have a bit of a brainstorm shall we?

I wonder — can blogs save the Web from becoming a useless mess?

I don’t know the answer, I’m just asking, but I will say that the advent of blogs could, if they’re done right, make it much easier for people to find the information they are looking for. I’ve already extolled the benefits of blogging technology so I’l leave that out for now.

A few weeks ago Digital Web published Weblogging vs. The Googliath by Brandon Olejniczak an article that discussed the effect blogs have on Google.

There are many opinions on this subject. Matt Haughey is quoted as saying:

As much as I hate to say it, I’m starting to buy the whole “blogs are ruining search engines” hype that’s been spread around these past few months.

I’ve heard this sentiment before. I think there may be some merit to it, but at the same time I think there is an even stronger opposing argument. If bloggers titled their posts properly and matched a relevant title to it’s relevant post it would be much, much easier to find things on the Web.

I get ridiculous hits from Google and 95% of them are relevant. People are finding what they want, or at least getting on the right track by hitting my blog. I title my posts (usually) very carefully for this very reason.

The thing is most bloggers don’t do this. I guess that is their own prerogative, but if more people did this and people were finding relevant information (or at least the scent of it) on blogs — wouldn’t that be a good thing for search engines and the Web in general?

I mean much of search engine optimization is about somehow “tricking” search engines into generating results for your sites. Your average search result doesn’t give you want you want does it? I’m not sure, but is sure seems that way. All this does is piss people off.

The problem isn’t the blogs themselves. It the lack of know-how or effort in writing good titles and meta data that causes blogs to muck up the search engines. Now that I think about it blogs are almost irrelevant of themselves.

I’ve expressed my feelings about how the Web is largely unusable. I think the biggest reason is that it’s so damn hard to find what you are looking for.

This week I spent countless hours searching for information on chronic back pain. All I found via google was crap. Utter crap. I found so many irrelevant pages or unrelated bits of information it was frankly depressing. All I wanted was some advice, some sort of pointers in the right direction but all I got was poorly organized sites and useless information.

So I posted about it here on my site. I titled the post “Living With Chronic Back Pain” because that is what the post was about.

I got lots of great advice, many links and generally a lot of good information and discussion about “living with chronic back pain” and it made me feel much better. I got some great advice as well that I sure as hell don’t mind sharing with anyone who comes looking.

Now I don’t think my post will show up that highly in Google for awhile if at all, but at the very least if someone sees it in a results listing they’ll know what they’re getting. I can say that for most of my posts.

I know I wish I’d come across a post like that. You know, sometimes I go as far as to add “blog” to my searches as many times blogs will provide you with much more focused information and can be a very good starting spot for a wider search.

They can almost be like a human-indexed search engine helper if done right, and really what does it take? Just match the proper titles to the proper entries and the technology will do the rest. To oversimplify a bit.

Aside from the obvious (yet very large — I know) fact that you always have to check where the information is coming from (trust is a whole other issue and post), doesn’t that seem like a good thing for the search engines and the Web in general?

So it’s open for discussion — as I said, I don’t know the answer but I think it’s a valid question. Can blogs help save the Web? What do you think?

Filed under: Web General

Comments

1. Richard said:

I get very little from weblogs. Mostly I read them when I want to learn how to have a more intelligent weblog design (in the semantic sense, I have no talent for making it look good). I do go to handsome weblogs, like yours, mostly to marvel at what I can’t achieve.

For, say, things like health I’ll only go to teaching hospital websites. For movies and music I go to All Movie and All Music or even IMDB or Amazon member reviews. Too often weblogs show up with a mention that a movie star is pretty or that they are reading or thinking about reading a book. I just skip Google and go where I know information is most likely to be posted.

Having been on the Internet before the web I find that weblogs most often give me a chance to meet kindred souls and sympathetic spirits. Much like the old homebrew BBSs that preceded them.

Posted on January 16, 2004 02:26 PM | #

2. Mike Steinbaugh said:

I think Google has trouble with blogs because people tend to joke around in them, throwing around words like “paris hilton” which are big keywords. But yes, titles are very important and some people don’t title their entries properly, resulting in chaos. I don’t think weblogs should be punished in the Google index though. A lot of weblogs are high quality web sites and should have a high page rank. I looked through my referrers after reading this article and at least ninety five percent of the hits I get on my site from Google are from keywords that make sense. People tend to look for say “instant messenger virus”. That’s my current #1 keyword. That search links to an article I wrote that explains how to remove the virus that is plaguing AIM right now. So to say that Google is broken in this case seems off to me. But yes, I can see why people get pissed off when they type in say “New England Patriots” and a blog comes up in the top three results. Heh, in that case, yes Google needs some tweaking.

It’s a tough thing to fix but I trust that Google’s engineers will come up with a smart solution. Like you said, blogs are often a valuable resource and a great asset to Google.

Posted on January 16, 2004 06:51 PM | #

3. Jorge said:

Totally agree with you. Weblogs generate very valuable information in part because they are not totally driven by commercial interests. The fact that some of its content has the purpose to satisfy the personal requirements of its author, makes it valuable for him and for the people that has the same interests as him. I think that in these days, usually everything relates to maximize profit and reduce costs, and knowledge is left behind as if it was not important at all.

Truth and experience are relative (as everything else). The diversity of ideas, opinions and thoughts that meet on a weblog broaden your views of the concept and the experience related to that topic. Nobody knows everything; the discussing (or in this case, weblogging) always nourishes your knowledge and takes you closer to the truth.

Posted on January 16, 2004 07:16 PM | #

4. Matt said:

Google is set up for a fall. I really get the impression from them that with their impending IPO, the quality of their product is taking a back seat to making the company “look good”. That may or may not be the case, but whereas before you could always count on Google to provide you with the best search results time and time again, that isn’t so much the case anymore.

I’ve started using Vivismo, and to me it is what Google used to be. I’m getting more relevant search results almost every time.

Posted on January 18, 2004 09:11 AM | #

5. Nollind Whachell said:

I would agree that blogs are an important contribution to the Web. Why? Because as I’ve said before, they relay information to people in a normal voice without an endless bombardment of marketing crap. Blogs continue the timeless tradition of “word of mouth” that many people rely upon for obtaining valuable information. Why does it work so much better than a search engine or advertisment? Because search engines and advertisments can very rarely relay the same elements of a “relationship” that a real person can. We connect with a person, get to know them, understand their values, and then begin to trust them. We “trust” that they will give us their honest opinion or their “truth” about something, be it good or bad. Companies on the other hand, usually only have their best interests at heart, which is why so many people have a hard time trusting them and having a long term relationship with them.

However, while I think weblogs add a lot of value, in my opinion, they still aren’t as effective as they could be primarily due to the structure of how they work (i.e. greatest strength is their greatest weakness). You mention the ability to post a question on your blog and get a response back. Well that’s great for you but if I’m some person who just created my own blog yesterday and I have questions to ask, it’s very unlikely that I’m going to get any comments back from anyone. Yes, I may be able to go to another blog to talk about what I’m interested in but I can’t really create a new topic with a question in mind, since it’s not my blog. If I was on a forum, however, I could do this. Yet, I don’t want to go to a forum because I like how the owner of the blog can control or moderate the discussions to keep things focused. Sure there are ways around this (i.e. email the question to the blog owner so he can post it for you, etc) but wouldn’t it be great if you could post a question on your blog about something and immediately get responses back from other people who are interested in what you are interested in and what you value, all via some external mechanism? Question is how would you do this? Actually maybe you can’t. Maybe there are limitations to technology. Maybe as I said before for that “relationship” to work, for that “trust” to exist, it takes time to create them and there is no instant way.

Hmmm, interesting. Wonder what trust would be like as a commodity? What if in trusting you, I trusted those you trusted? What would this web of trust look like and could it actually work? Or is this already happening today in a basic way? In trusting you, I’m more than likely to trust those you link to off your own site (i.e. External Essentials)? And is this really a web of trust or a web of relationships where the trust is implied in the relationship?

Anyways, I’ll end it here as I’m starting to ramble as well. :)

Posted on January 18, 2004 10:51 AM | #

6. MJH said:

To take advice from a weblog, you must trust the person writing it. So, I’m not sure I could trust a random site on the web with my backpain. For instance, in response to your posting on back pain– if someone had left “advice” that you should “ice your back pain”, that may in fact be the worst thing for it. Yet, its still a logical treatment to most people.

Stuff like “this is what worked for me, try it at your own risk” is fine, as long as the visitor knows its not real medical advice. THAT goes the way of home remedies, family traditions and housewive’ tales.

Posted on January 19, 2004 06:19 AM | #

7. Keith said:

MJH – while you mention a good point, the one about trust, which I did address in my post – it’s not the actual advice that I was trying to highlight in my example.

I spent hours searching for information on back pain and I didn’t get anything better than the comments left on my post. By the way I saw lots of clinical sites advising ice as a treatment for back pain…

Of course your not going to trust a random site about your back pain, just like I’m not going to take any of the advice given without first talking to my doctor.

At some point it’s up to the reader to take responsibility for sorting out the good information. What my post could offer is a decent place to start. Maybe medical advice isn’t the best example coming from myself, but the theory is still good.

I work for a hospital and we have a consulting nurse hot line. They get calls for medical advice every day. Many of these calls cover the same topics over and over. Would it not be a great thing for not only them, but people searching the Web for this basic medical advice, if they could have a blog of FAQs?

If done right it’d be much easier to deal with than all the other medical advice sites out there. The advice would be easier to find and it’d come from a trusted source.

Posted on January 19, 2004 07:31 AM | #

8. beerzie boy said:

Fascinating post.

A good blog is like a good conversationalist; a good post is like a good conversation. I view the blogsosphere (boy, I hate that word) as a large social gathering. Like any gathering, they can be interesting, informative, or a total waste of time. It depends on which ones you go to and who you talk with.

As far as Google and blogs go, it’s almost a chicken-and-egg thing. Is it the bloggers’ (or any content generator, for that matter) responsibility to structure their information so that search engines can parse it? If the blogger wants to attract the right kind of traffic, the answer is yes: if the blogger doesn’t really care, the answer is no.

Posted on January 20, 2004 08:25 AM | #

9. Ian said:

Given that the overall signal-to-noise ratio of the web is likely to get worse as the bar to entry is lowered even further, I’d guess that blogs aren’t going to cure it (or kill it, for that matter). They have their place, obviously, and I expect other ideas will emerge from time to time.

A big part of the problem, in my view, is that Google does too good a job of brute-force indexing the whole mess (i.e. the web as a whole). It’s not a good substitute for properly organising and filtering it, but it is a substitute.

Enough of a substitute to stifle progress on alternate views, at least. One of the alternate views that I think could take the web to the “next level” would be to tie it in to the “real” world in a geographical sense.

For example, supposing it’s lunch time, and I need to go out and find something to eat. It would be nice to pull up a directory which was focused just on the local geographic area (in this case, reasonable walking distance from the current location) and get a comprehensive list of options.

At the moment, I don’t expect this to happen, so I don’t try. I mean, I could try a Google search … or find one or more local directories that seem to have lists of eating places, but none of them seem to have a comprehensive list either.

I noticed a few months back that a site in the UK which appeared to be working along these lines was in financial difficulty. (The site seems to still be going, though I nearly left without going beyond the home page - the immediate impression was that I’d arrived at one of those lovely outfits that provide homes for homeless domain names!) I haven’t had time to explore this and get a feel for how effective it is, but I think the basic theory is correct.

Perhaps over time, as more businesses and organisations get a web presence, these types of directory will become more comprehensive and more effective. I’d tend to want to include every relevant organisation, web site or not - and it would make having a web site a no-brainer for many of the small businesses who currently don’t seem to find them necessary.

(Clue: thinking about impact/tie-in with mobile technology here too … at the moment it looks like a solution looking for a problem …)

Of course, this is just one “view” that could be superimposed on the web, there are doubtless many others, and none would necessarily need to interact with the others. (The main requirements would be a primary criteria which would define the purpose, and some form of quality control to ensure that it remained focused and useful for its intended audience.)

All this could be helped to a degree by some more formal meta-data - e.g. ways of identifying geographic location, type of site, etc.

Maybe I could hold my breath and wait for the “Semantic Web”. I’ve only read a little about it, but it seems a little too Sci-Fi to me. Nice idea if it works, but I can’t imagine enough co-ordination happening to make it fly. I’d bet that some relatively simple scheme will happen, while everyone’s still waiting for this to take off.

(When I entered the computer industry in the early ’80s, the buzz was that EDI was going to revolutionise the way business transactions were processed, in the very near future. Then again, about every five years some new “program generator” or the like was announced and was going to make my job obsolete! I’m still here, they aren’t, mostly … and EDI as envisaged then still isn’t anything like a universal standard!)

OK, here’s hoping this hasn’t gone off at too much of a tangent …

-Ian.

Posted on January 21, 2004 03:20 AM | #