Noise in the Bloggosphere

As I read through my RSS feeds in Google Reader today, I was once again struck by the increas­ing num­ber of famil­iar head­lines. By this I don’t mean sim­ilar themes con­tinue to be explored (although true — Hil­ary is clearly a bad, bad, bad woman and John McCain throws kit­tens into wells), but rather that I had already read the art­icles that were pop­ping as new posts. My imme­di­ate thought was that Reader wasn’t catch­ing my ‘mark as read’ flags, or that I had inad­vert­ently cre­ated duplic­ate feeds. Alas, neither the case. These are the same posts…simply with dif­fer­ent author­ship claimed. Note that I am not even get­ting into the auto­mated blog post pir­acy that is designed only to attract search engine attention.

When you try to stay on top of all your news feeds with a reader and attempt to stra­tegic­ally man­age the mul­ti­tude of feeds, the col­lapsing of feeds into head­lines makes this phe­nomenon rather obvi­ous. As I con­sidered this, I real­ized that there is a cer­tain tier­ing in the blog­go­sphere. Digg, Redit and other aggreg­at­ors are at the low­est level and expli­citly point to other’s posts. At the ‘highest’ level you have blogs that cre­ate abso­lutely ori­ginal, thought­ful and unique posts. Between these there are all man­ners of vari­ants. Review sites are some­where in this milieu and they account for a sub­stan­tial amount of this over­lap. Some new gad­get is released and the sites all tend to either hear about it or get their hands on it around the same time. Yet, it is inter­est­ing to note (when you have far too many RSS feeds com­ing in) post grav­ity and proliferation.

If you are sub­scrib­ing to ori­ginal source feeds, you might pickup on the press release. This fol­lows the end­less rumour posts from the industry watch­ers. The press release sparks a mul­ti­tude of posts on how cor­rect an industry site was and then com­ments on these. All of these posts get picked up at some point in the aggreg­at­ors and you have sub­stan­tial data ballooning.

An His­tor­ical Example

All of this is to say that things haven’t changed that much. In my stud­ies of 19th Cen­tury hotels in a small rural entrepôt, I came across a charge in the news­pa­per in 1900 that this centre had more drink­ing spots per cap­ita than any other place in the Province. A stiff charge, and one that I found echoed every dec­ade or so in books, news­pa­pers and in aca­demic papers. Sud­denly one could find many ref­er­ences to the rather intem­per­ate char­ac­ter­istic of the city in ques­tion. As arte­fact, the charge went unex­amined and reappeared with little addi­tional embel­lish­ment, but was accep­ted simply for its pro­lif­er­a­tion. For whatever reason, I ques­tioned this charge in 2003, and decided to chal­lenge the evid­ence. The simple facts were that the ori­ginal author used a busi­ness dir­ect­ory to com­pile a list of estab­lish­ments. He was inter­ested in unique stat­ist­ics, but the busi­ness dir­ect­ory was designed to be very user friendly and dir­ect read­ers to the address or pro­pri­etor os the busi­ness. As a res­ult, they attemp­ted to list as many per­muta­tions as people would know an estab­lish­ment by. For example, The Brit­ish Hotel was lis­ted under that name as well as Jones’ Hotel (the pro­pri­etor), Smith’s Hotel (the guy that owned it two years ago), The Anglo-American (as it was known when Smith owned it) and often even oth­ers. As a res­ult when the journ­al­ist sought to count hotels, he found four ref­er­ences to what was in fact the same estab­lish­ment, but each seemed unique to him. What he didn’t seem to con­sider was that the busi­ness dir­ect­ory was not designed to provide the inform­a­tion he wanted — and this went unnoticed by every per­son revis­it­ing his art­icle for the next 100 years. Learned aca­dem­ics ended up over­es­tim­at­ing the num­ber of bars by 4x or more. This isn’t to point out that I am just a bet­ter scep­tic, but simply to re-emphasize that a crit­ical approach to journ­al­ism is required in a blog as much as any other media.

Post Pro­lif­er­a­tion = Truth

So what this have to do with post pro­lif­er­a­tion? Much I think. Just as an ori­ginal post gains cred­ib­il­ity, simply through pro­lif­er­a­tion, the evid­ence of the same hap­pen­ing today is amp­li­fied by the blog­go­sphere. And I sense all the more so as quant­ity seems to be the meas­ure. Most of our met­rics revolve around read­er­ship, hits, and ref­er­ences, not ori­gin­al­ity, vera­city or such qual­it­at­ive measures.

Get­ting back to our ori­ginal point, I have a sense that one might be able to con­struct a tiered model to show the evol­u­tion of a post. There are ori­gin­at­ors who focus on actual cre­ation, then there are the clear regur­git­at­ors, and then the aggreg­at­ors. In between there are a vari­ety of oth­ers, adding two cents to oth­ers posts, using an idea as a found­a­tion and riff­ing off. This is what it’s all about. These are not all bad things. The study of the evol­u­tion is a glor­i­ous dis­cip­line itself.

Yet, in the back of my mind when I note the great repe­ti­tion there’s a sense that people are par­ti­cip­at­ing, but not get­ting it. Maybe its all part of the flow, but I sense there is a flaw too, in the meas­ures. If its about the col­lat­eral advert­ising with Google Adsense, then its about click thru. Get someone to the post and whether they read it or not, con­nect the head­line to the adverts care­fully selec­ted by Google.

On Microb­log­ging

Last year, I added the sideb­log plug-in to my own blog, basic­ally a spot where I could col­lect links and things of note without adding any­thing to them. While I could have left this in my main­stream of posts, some­how this degraded my sense of my own place in the blog­go­sphere. Now I am by no means the ori­ginal con­trib­utor on the level of most of those whom I track, but I gen­er­ally make a point of try­ing to indic­ate when I have seen a cool post and do have some­thing to add and there­fore include it in my stream.

Ori­gin­ally I did not pub­lish my asides. They were pos­ted in the top corner of my blog, but not included in my RSS feed. I flicked the switch on them yes­ter­day morn­ing — mainly as an exer­cise in microb­log­ging. JoeResort, recently found that the twitter-like microb­log­ging is some­thing that really fit his mode. I have had a twit­ter account (there’s actu­ally two — another story) for quite a while. I have installed wid­gets, blog and browser plu­gins, but its not quite some­thing that has clicked for me. The asides have really been self-focussed, much like a par­al­lel del.icio.us (I recently added my own col­lec­tion as a tag cloud on my blog). Not that I was con­cerned at all with fil­ter­ing and cre­at­ing a pub­lic per­sona, but simply that I found deli­cious and asides the most con­veni­ent way to track things. The third ( and par­al­lel means) I have been track­ing ‘things’ of note is of course through Zotero in Fire­fox. Although Zotero is a smash­ing tool and offers great data inter­change, that syncing not auto­matic, and I use a vari­ety of machines, each of which has its own sql­ite Zotero data­base. I am sure that I could cre­ate a syncing mech­an­ism (prob­ably over­ween­ing con­fid­ence on my part) but the local nature of the data­base is both pos­it­ive (speed, func­tion­al­ity, stan­dalone oper­a­tion) and a road­b­lock (syncing). Addi­tion­ally, I don’t use Fire­Fox all the time. I like Safari quite often for its blaz­ing speed, and more import­antly, on the machine I am writ­ing this on, Fire­fox has prob­lems with the old G4 and is a CPU hog. But I am going off topic here.

Les­sons

So where are we? Attrib­ute stuff when you steal it. Much like the stu­dents to whom I try to explain that ref­er­en­cing is a good thing — it just demon­strates that you have been a good researcher — shar­ing inform­a­tion is a good thing. I may not have seen the post you did and it is through you I find it.

Try to add your own stamp of vary­ing length or eru­di­tion. If you can. This is where we are able to demon­strate the real value of the media. Col­lab­or­at­ive con­sid­er­a­tion and con­struc­tion. The way you see some­thing is dif­fer­ent from my per­spect­ive, if only in some minute way. Share that per­spect­ive and watch the syn­ergy happen.

Find the tool that works for you and maybe it’s some­thing as simple as microb­log­ging. You have to find a means if inform­a­tion shar­ing that suits your self. Not every one is going to sit in their base­ments and cre­ate video pod­casts, nor is blog­ging some­thing that appeals to all. But there are a wide vari­ety of means in the online space to par­ti­cip­ate and the crit­ical eye is often not blinded by the technology.

If you are watch­ing this stuff, reflect on the way in which mater­ial is repurposed/mashed up/stolen or simply blindly passed along the chain. Maybe what we need is a qual­i­fic­a­tion for not­ing the ori­gin­al­ity of a post and thereby allow­ing one to set your own thresholds for view­ing. The chal­lenge here of course is meas­ur­ing rel­at­ive ori­gin­al­ity and fresh­ness. Maybe is you put a text through a tag­ging seman­ti­cizer and then com­pared the meta gen­er­ated you could start to com­pile a genetic descriptor that could allow for determ­in­ing over­all ori­gin­al­ity. The down­side of this is that inform­a­tion is ori­ginal for me the first time I see it, not the first time someone else human or machine sees it.

Actu­ally, this whole post is an apo­logy for the drought of posts on my own blog as of late. It’s just that I am stu­di­ously attempt­ing to keep all that I write scrup­tu­ously ori­ginal, but also veracious ;-)