Forum Moderators: open
related thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]
I know that many academics and the like want proper information on the topic they are searching for but with the commercial nature of the internet today we are going to have to put up with the advertising at least temporarily.
What I have seen happen is that those front ends that are putting more ads than sites on to their results are losing popularity - experienced internet users are shying away from them and moving to sites like google and alltheweb which give nice clean listings.
It appears that the more cluttered you make your user interface the more advertising revenue you can generate, but this seems to be at the cost of losing some of your user base. Of course if you lose enough user base then you start losing your advertising revenue!!
If you want nice neatly presented genuine results then the way to get it to promote the use of the 'nice friendly' engines with the less experienced net user.
Basically if you can't tell an ad from useful info then you probably deserve to be suckered :0
Please send $50 for our latest potion of infinite youth, specially laced with viagra for extra zest.
(I'd pay $60.00 for a potion of invisibility if you have one)
That said, it was an interesting article :)
I've got an invisible(and massless, odorless, tasteless) potion I can ship over to you, does that count?
Those search services that deliver quality, free listings will continue to be my first choice for search.
"...search engines are still underutilized by advertisers seeking highly targeted audiences ..."
These words of wisdom from Danny Sullivan [searchenginewatch.com] should be emblazoned across the psyche of every person who has anything to do with the Web – from Webmasters to marketers to the gray-satin suits monitoring “the bottom line”.
Between the arguments supporting a well-constructed thesis, JD Lasica’s [well.com] article [ojr.usc.edu] highlights three key points:
The last need not come about. As Danny says:
"There are very few places where people tell you exactly what they want, in real time.” ... “The ability to interact with the users right within a search results area - that's gold…"
In other words, the answer’s been out there all the time! Optimize your site. No pain, no gain, there are NO shortcuts, and ad revenue driving a business model Does Not Work.
Some… er, most, thought there were shortcuts to the pinnacle of success. We’re paying for their rapid descent into an un-moneyed abyss. To avoid the fallout made inevitable by engines and directories acceding to ‘crass commercialism’ while we serve the decidedly commercial interests of most of our clients, we need to put Danny’s further advice to action, i.e. we need to clamor “…for more targeted commercial search results…”.
Far better to do this than debate the minutiae or ethics of various ‘Fly now, pay later’ pyramid schemes devised by thirteen year-olds wearing Armani, driving Ferrari, and working Inktomi.
For as long as we ‘do not mind’ paid listings we will be subject to their manipulation and misrepresentation. Where money is involved, there are those who will go to any lengths…
So far, Google [google.com] has been the only engine to play it straight and true. Yahoo! [yahoo.com] does little or nothing to make known the cost to businesses of placement in its database and, as for those in the dock, they will probably “…staunch the flow of red ink…” for a while before dying of complications or exposure.
The nut of it is that while commercialism is devaluing search results we, as businesspeople or academics, want both new and savvy Web users to visit our and our clients’ sites. Ian Turner’s points are well taken but equally valid counters to them are found in this [webmasterworld.com] thread.
mnw’s understandably jaundiced view of “journalistic integrity”, however, cannot go completely unchallenged. As Webmasters and Web users, content should be as important to us as the code rendering it. To question mnw’s dismissal of writers criticizing each other within and across media as hypocritical, I might wander a bit off topic. Bear with me if you will…
mnw, while I share your disgust of the insubstantial, overblown hype pumped out by the bubble-headed idiots pretending to control what we call ‘the media’, I believe that – deep in the recesses of the Web – journalism is not only surviving, it is thriving. I believe there is good reason for the 'pot', in this instance JD Lasica writing for Online Journalism Review [ojr.usc.edu], to call the 'kettle' black.
With the dotcom implosion, competition heightened between conventional and so-called ‘new media’. Online, the Web-based editions of mainstream publications looked to the /. [slashdot.com]s and the Salon [salon.com]s for signs of the future.
They might as well have used mirrors because although the Smart Tags [microsoft.com] story [ptech.wsj.com] was broken to the world at large by the WSJ [wsj.com]’s Walt Mossberg [ptech.wsj.com], independent online journalists carried the battle to Microsoft and, ultimately, won a reprieve for all those using the Net.
JD Lasica [jd.manilasites.com]’s ‘blogroll’ lists, among others, Dan Gillmor [web.siliconvalley.com], Doc Searl [doc.weblogs.com], Dave Winer [scripting.com], and Deborah Branscum [buzz.weblogs.com] (barbed-wire prose), online journos who – without letup or compromise and with huge effect – blew away the smokescreen obscuring Redmond’s bid for Web domination and showed our favorite monopolists for the carpetbaggers they are.
The Smart Tags issue saw at least one writer [scobleizer.manilasites.com] leaned on by his employer because of what can only be viewed as ‘undue pressure exerted by parties unknown’.
It’s important to remember that Salon and other publications played an important, but supporting, role in the Smart Tags saga.
Unlike the conventional media, these ‘new media’ writers owe little or nothing to anybody and they all seem to lend weight to Victor Stone’s [fourstones.net] injunction, "Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself."
Unpaid and unsung, they paint the big picture for those willing to see that the Web is about more than its constituent parts. For anybody wanting to stay on top of tech-related Web developments, their daily commentaries make essential, informed reading.
They remind us that the nature of the medium precludes us acting in isolation. What we do, especially on the Web, affects those about us.
These writers epitomize or are the face of what I call ‘editorial integrity’. Were our amateur (unpaid) journalists to sell out, they would fade into an obscurity remarkably similar to that which recently swallowed countless dotcommers.
By maintaining editorial integrity, they are writing a new chapter in journalism.
Their scathing insights read like reruns of Hunter S Thompson’s hounding of Nixon to a drunken demise in The Great Shark Hunt [amazon.com], Mailer’s indictment of the space program in Fire on the Moon [amazon.com], and Tom Wolfe’s desiccation of the fictional Sherman McCoy in Bonfire of the Vanities [amazon.com]. If a writing form could be called “the new journalism”, this is it.
Unlike Salon and other conventionally structured new media ventures, these writers are not looking to become digital Rolling Stone [rollingstone.com]s-of-old. Motivated by a passion for their professions – most appear to be techies of one kind or another, they write on issues affecting them and countless others for little or no reward.
The venture capitalists of the dotcom boom could have learnt a great deal from the bloggers before they went out to shred the Web. Among other things…
The upshot of all this? Two things. First, despite Silicon Alley’s propensity to chase the filthy lucre at ninety miles-an-hour down a dead-end street, reaction to their dumb addiction by those in the know tells us that the Web as a whole is in remarkably good shape.
Secondly, this is a medium with a message… we're not for sale.
Geez, are there any left? I am trying to think of a list and the only two I can come up with are
Google (it does have advertising, but it is clearly marked)
ODP
Any others?
-G
If anyone knows any different let me know.
PageCount - I loved your article maybe you should get it published in a newsletter. I agree with pretty much all you said, but have been around too long to be swayed by idealism any more. When it comes to the crunch those who control the money can afford computers :o
All the best Ian
”Geez, are there any left?” - grnidone -
Besides Google [google.com] and dmoz [dmoz.org] - I don't think so, grnidone, although as Ian rightly points out, alltheweb [alltheweb.com] has kept its nose pretty clean.
As an end user, my first choice (and home page for want of sorting my Favorites into a semblance of a page) is Google. Results have, if anything, become more relevant as the algo has been tweaked through the year.
Should Google not deliver, I'll move to alltheweb for SERPS that carry more links to individual pages. Although there results take some sifting, FAST’s relevance algos also seem to have improved appreciably over the past few months.
I don't know what it is about FAST [fast.no] that has me returning to them on a consistent basis. Although they've introduced PartnerSite [fast.no], the fact that this amounts to little more than an Inktomi [inktomi.com]-style spidering guarantee, counts in their favor. Moreover, their Scandinavian origin tells this African yahoo that, besides operating in the most wired environment on the planet, FAST's idea of outrageous is about as exciting as a Finnish square dance :).
In other words, like Per Koch's Pandia [pandia.com] and Formula One [f1db.com]'s Mika Hakkinen, they are dependable, deliver on their promises, and are unlikely to dabble in anything other than that at which they profess to be good. Which, in FAST’s case, is enterprise or Web-related search technologies.
Beyond that, like Google, they understand that "less is more" and this carries massive clout among Web users. Hence my reluctance to count Teoma [teoma.com] out of the game before they really get going.
Should I want to mope through a directory, I'll use that old standby and Webmaster's friend, the ODP [dmoz.org]. It offers a quiet environment and, unlike Yahoo! [yahoo.com], isn't tainted with paid inclusion which, to my mind, means skewed results and more telephone time.
ODP is the forgotten stepchild of the Web. I'm willing to bet that most of us, were we to subject our log files to in-depth scrutiny, would find unknown referrals coming from sites carrying the ODP dump. Their distributed DB gives all of those listed a chance of being found on sites from here to Timbuktu, an invaluable attribute insofar as PageRank and similar algos heed incoming links to determine relevance.
(And there's always Gary Price's [gwis2.circ.gwu.edu] intro to the Invisible Web for hardcore fact finding.)
As for the rest? Well, the article that sparked off this thread finds its veracity in my log files. Although most inexperienced users will opt for MSN and Yahoo!, Google outstrips both by some 40% in terms of Search generated traffic. The decline of Alta Vista seems to be irreversible and, in the face of increasing traffic, engines like DirectHit, GoTo, Excite, HotBot and Netscape are pathetic shadows of their former, more robust selves.
The lessons inherent in the rise and fall of sundry engines and directories? I don’t really know but, to me, it still says that those who went for the money got burnt and those that focused on search carried the day.
It seems to be about as simple or as complicated as all that :).
”I agree with pretty much all you said, but have been around too long to be swayed by idealism. When it comes to the crunch those who control the money can afford computers.”
- Ian -
Ian, I’m South African. I think the last idealist left town sometime in ’97 :). We are a nation of cynics. If passion comes across as idealism, though, I plead guilty. Thanks, too, for reading through what started out as a mere post but, as is becoming all too frequent, turned into a voluminous and somewhat convoluted thesis.
I don’t believe I’m taking an idealistic approach to the engines or those writing about related Internet and Web subjects. My log files indicate that the engines are reaping the fruits of their all-too-pragmatic approach to “staunching flows of red ink…" and my log files seem to resonate to the same frequency as those of many posters to this forum.
The engines are finding out the hard way that searchers from all quarters do not trust businesses that try to palm off paid results. In the medium term, users do not see them as dispassionate arbiters of relevance.
That said, I understand that there is as much blurring as there is distinction in our less-than-perfect cyberworld.
When somebody gets down to writing “The Net Wars – From Front-end to Back-end” they’re going to have to differentiate between the battles fought by the Microsoft [microsoft.com]s and Sun [sun.com]s from those waged between the AV [altavista.com]s and the Northern Light [northernlight.com]s. They’ll also have to distinguish the campaigns seeking domination of the Internet from those aimed at dominating the Web.
The engines and those lending it content are what I’d call front-end warriors. They’re service providers and are susceptible to the whims and clicks of individual users. They’re soft and, like most dotcoms, do not arouse much passion – much less give rise to new types of journalism.
At the back-end, however, powering this whole shebang, we have the Microsofts and the Suns and the Cisco [cisco.com]s and the AOL Time Warner [aoltimewarner.com]s. This is where money talks and this is where the guy who can take the most heat and blood on his shirt wins the day and the virtual oval office.
This is a winner-take-all war that has as much to do with politics, business, and the dark side of the human psyche as it has to do with the security flaws in MS IIS. It is being waged now and it is not being adequately covered in the mainstream media.
And this is where independent developers turned amateur journalists come in. As far as JD Lasica [jd.manilasites.com]’s article is concerned, I agree that my exuberance may have got the better of me and clouded the real value of blog writers from the development community. However, that should not devalue the fact that these guys are listened to by the likes of Redmond.
Take a look [davenet.userland.com] at who’s reading Dave Winer’s [davenet.userland.com] latest musings when he gets into the office in the morning. If what Dave says matters to the likes of Bill Gates, then it means he has influence. For that reason alone, what he says, matters.
The other bloggers mentioned in my post above are not small-time hacks bludgeoning a living from the Web in time-honored Corey Rudl [marketingtips.com] fashion. They’re serious alternatives to the mainstream press. They interpret what comes off the wires as it does so. That it takes the New York Times [newyorktimes.com] two days to replicate the same reportage is not their problem.
The bloggers fight their battles in real time.
Smart tags were not an issue of interest to idealists. In fact, they were not an issue to most people. If you do a search on them, you’ll find very few articles reporting their introduction but you’ll be swamped with those reporting their temporary retraction.
Smart tags were a threat to copyright and, from a marketing point of view, they were A Bad Idea. Both points of view were communicated to Microsoft with succinct vehemence.
Sure, Microsoft listens to the developers because the Dollar Bill’s hopes for Hailstorm [microsoft.com] are, in large part, inextricably tied to his relationship with the broader development community. So what? They need whatever extra clout they can get. The point is that, just because they have Bill’s ear doesn’t mean they have to whisper sweet nothings into it. Instead, they headed straight for the cerebral cortex and I think, ultimately, Redmond will thank them for doing so.
In a perverse way, and unlike their competitors, Microsoft seem to realize that their worst enemies are probably their greatest friends. So they listen to them.
But, again, I digress… :). Let Winer fill you in on what he means by “integrity” [davenet.userland.com]. And this is what he (and many other techies) believes they need to do to get there…
”All the admonitions … will not coax integrity from the process. Instead, we have to, as technologists, re-form journalism, Cluetrain-style, so our voices can be heard without interpretation … Let your ideas find a marketplace among people with minds and non-trivial attention-spans.”
-Winer [davenet.userland.com]-
I don’t think that’s idealism – that’s telling it like it is… :)
We recently held an election over here (UK) and the turnout was the lowest ever. All the politicians have been on about why the turnout was so low. The answer is that most people didn't get the saturation coverage that they got in previous years because they are all focused on their own particular interests and are getting 24 hour MTV with no news or 24 Sky Sports with very limited news - in fact most people only thought about the election in passing and thus missed the polling day.
With widening choice in the media available to us we get a situation where those people who thought they were important (politicians, newspaper publishers, tv news journalists etc) will realise they have little bearing on most peoples lives and the world will just get on with what it is doing and ignore them - it is months since I last bought a newspaper and rarely will I bother to read the online versions.
Anyway there is my tuppence worth on the media and journalism.
Next point incorporating browsers into the operating system. Isn't it an absolutely obvious thing to do, there is absolutely no way I could consider it illegal to sell an operating system incorporating a browser, it is like trying to sell a car without air conditioning. How many car manufacturers have been taken to court for incorporating an air conditioning system into their vehicle. (Before everyone gets uptight - I am not a minion of microsoft - I just compare what they have done to what is done in other industries without anyone raising an eyebrow)
Back to those search engines, my experience is that all experienced internet users look at the integrity of the search engine that they are using and this influences whether they will stay with a particular engine. From what we have discussed previously Google, Fast and DMOZ all have pretty good rep - personally I use Google out of choice because I can't stand all the paid stuff in my results. This however is not true of your average Joe Bloggs who for the most part probably doesn't change the Engine provided for him by his ISP and in any case doesn't realise the difference between the web sites and web pages provided by Yahoo. To him it doesn't matter whether the results are biased by paid submissions or unbiased with no paid submissions being taken by his search engine, all he is interested in is does the result of his search bear any relevance to him and can he get what he wants????? and quickly.
Ohh F**k - that really came out very cynical but in my experience that is the way the world works.
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself." This has to be the statement for the new millenium. Unfortunately there are many who would like it to read "Don't belong, Never join, Think what we put into your head!!"
All the best
Ian
Ian
Yubba-dubba-doo… I agree with every point you make bar one – we’re victims of our own rather than the media’s stupidity.
There’s always the “Off” switch.
The internet news junkie will see only what is provided to him by his ISP (AOL or such like) or Search Engine.
I'll give you this much. Cognitive overload owing to the machine-gun staccato of digitized packets shot laser-like into our cue-ball brains is more likely to induce mental paralysis than spark neuronal activity and intellectual stimulation. The notion of AOL as a serious news source is macabre yet compelling. Just how many stretch their atrophied minds beyond Britney’s [washingtonmonthly.com] rubberized body to scour subsidiaries CNN [cnn.com] and Time [time.com], etc. for meaningful content? That AOL’s role as news provider has been lent ghastly reality by millions of self-lobotomized subscribers worldwide and that Time and CNN are perceived as serious [jd.manilasites.com] news sources, speaks volumes about and very little for the average Webizen.
We recently held an election over here (UK) and the turnout was the lowest ever. All the politicians have been on about why the turnout was so low.
Having browsed the latest at [url=http:///www.thebaffler.com]The Baffler[/url], I’d posit that your low polls had more to do with what Baffler editor, Thomas Frank, calls market populism [thenation.com], economic forces favoring a diminishing elite bolstered by government abrogation of responsibility to better serve fiscal dictats - see his book, One Market, Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism and the End of Economic Democracy (Doubleday). Alternatively, it might be the result of an affliction Josh Glenn, editor of Hermenaut [hermenaut.com] describes in I’d Like to Force the World to Sing – The Making of a Yes Generation: “Today, OK-addled young people have converted the frustrated idealism of Generation X into a passionate complacency.”
With widening choice in the media available to us we get a situation where those people who thought they were important (politicians, newspaper publishers, tv news journalists etc) will realise they have little bearing on most peoples lives and the world will just get on with what it is doing and ignore them - it is months since I last bought a newspaper and rarely will I bother to read the online versions.
Seriously, with the Bumblebees (Bush ‘n Blair) in charge both sides of the ocean who the hell but the most cynical, deranged, or drug addled could be interested in party politics and conventional Western democracy? Good grief – can you imagine what type of wheedle-headed dump-truck dirt brain you’d need to be to work for people like that? Politicians are generally failed businessmen. Lower you cannot go. They have no clue and those who think they do are way beyond redemption.
Isn't it an absolutely obvious thing to do, there is absolutely no way I could consider it illegal to sell an operating system incorporating a browser, it is like trying to sell a car without air conditioning. How many car manufacturers have been taken to court for incorporating an air conditioning system into their vehicle.
I agree with your sentiments on browser commingling – it made sense and screwed Netscape into oblivion. At the coal face, ethics do not come into it. We introduce them and go on to enforce them by popular demand or dissatisfaction. In other words, we pursue our own agendas. The fact is, any businessperson worth his or her salt would give their eyeteeth, grandmothers, families and inheritance to lick the high fiscal ground walked by Gates and his senior flunkies. Whether they are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is beside the point. These things are relative and our Masters of the Cyberverse are serious businessmen. They are not to be messed with.
In my country, we have politicians with blood on their hands and bodies under their compost heaps. Next to the Dollar Bill, shoe-shiners like Craig Mundie and those running our much-vaunted ‘engines’, though, they are about as innovative as IBM, who give us reason today to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of their last good idea, the PC. Business is, as we know, a tough nut. It is not for the weak, the faint of heart, or the fairer sex. The latter will take time to get used to the idea but, believe me, they will :). Tough decisions demand tough men and Gates, the Man of our new Millennium, knows that his competitors are not long for this world or, for that matter, the next. He’ll slice ‘n dice ‘em without batting an eyelid. And when the going gets tough, Dubya’s administration will back him all the way past Charles James, the vindictive [washingtonpost.com] head of the Justice Department Antitrust Division.
Watch the dance of dunces [ecfp.cadc.uscourts.gov] where motions in the antitrust case pass back and forth with a regularity that would leave any geriatric beaming.
Back to those search engines, my experience is that all experienced internet users look at the integrity of the search engine that they are using and this influences whether they will stay with a particular engine.
There’s an article about the success of the paid engines at internet.com [internetnews.com]. I’m not buying into it completely and I’d challenge any commercial entity to take a long look down the history of their log files for a pattern indicating strength in this sector. As far as I can see, market forces – and even Web newbies - are dumping PPC for relevance. If they’re not, they’re sticking to MSN which shows strong traffic flow these days. All the others, e.g. Kanoodle, Sprinks, etc., are finding that when the going gets tough, it pays to have a good slush fund close to hand. As for the paid inclusion guys, LookSmart is not looking as clever as it once did, and the guaranteed inclusion engines like Inktomi still appear to have no control over their spidering. All are diving on the ratings as Google surges ever upwards. GoTo is the exception proving the rule. This animal lures SEOs, marketers, and shoppers alike and, of all the PPC or pay for inclusion engines, they appear to be doing well. Their appearance at 23rd position in the latest Nielsen NetRatings [209.249.142.27] (as opposed to 12 for Google) supports this thesis.
To him it doesn't matter whether the results are biased by paid submissions or unbiased with no paid submissions being taken by his search engine, all he is interested in is does the result of his search bear any relevance to him and can he get what he wants?
One of the fallacies I find inherent in the Pay to Play debate is the notion that these guys lack money. It’s rubbish. They are not scrabbling for pennies in a sock drawer. Outfits like Inktomi, FAST, etc. are huge in the global corporate solutions market. Inktomi, AV, and Atomica, et al power moreover.com and FAST's DB feeds IBM and Qwest, the latter being one of the forces behind TEOMA. When it comes to Search, these guys are merely milking a sucker market for what it’s worth for as long as that market leeches technologies now of diminished importance to these re-invented corporate solutions providers. Put bluntly, they continue to have their way with us...
Ohh F**k - that really came out very cynical but in my experience that is the way the world works.
Ian, our views are in concert, all is well in a world comprising angels and ogres, and time has come to assess the state of play in Search as a whole. In short, Microsoft, its competitors, and all the bottom feeders, i.e. engines, directories and the like, seek Internet and Web dominance. Every nook and cranny on the Net is a ‘site of struggle’ for these money mongers. Microsoft leads the way in duplicity and sleight of hand. Legal and ethical arguments seeking their downfall amount to little more than jealousy, political maneuvering, and bombast. All is fair in love, war, and business. Redmond’s main competitors at the back end seem to have run out of steam purely because they tried to take Redmond on at their own game. Sun, Cisco, IBM, etc. are going to have to flee if they’re to fight another day.
Moreover, the way various tactics and strategies have played out over the past two months, we’d do well to remember that Redmond’s genius was .Net and the promise of Hailstorm. It was a brilliant smokescreen-cum-sucker punch that caught the opposition off guard and flat footed. The flagship in which .Net is supposed to sail to general acceptance is WinXP. If you believe Robert Scoble [scobleizer.manilasites.com], it’s the best platform to hit computing since Linux. If you follow Joel Spolsky [joelonsoftware.com]’s line, .Net and Hailstorm are nothing but a complex mix of smoke and mirrors, FUD, and vaporware. In other words, WinXP is merely the Trojan Horse delivering subscription computing in the form of Windows Product Activation (WPA) and Passport membership - see WinXP: Unsafe on any PC? [webmasterworld.com]
I’ve no reason to doubt the "integrity" (that foul word again) of the e-mail [joelonsoftware.com] to Spolsky from within the compound. It clarifies a great deal. Microsoft have painted a broad and stunning canvas of Web Service Nirvana that has everybody agog. But it's all an illusion – we’re to enjoy the show while it lasts. As we – in our stupor - do so, they’re getting on with the seamier side of running a profitable business, i.e. increasing PC and software sales, locking users into their new model of Plug and Pay, pushing Smart Tags through MSNBC [msnbc.com] - see my recent post in this regard at Microsoft to drop smart tags [webmasterworld.com], undermining chief Web competitors AOL, and crushing the likes of Napster and RealPlayer with MSN Music.
In competition, AOL have been a revelation of late. Quietly, surreptitiously, they’ve rolled out Magic Carpet [betanews.com], their equally suspect and bug-ridden answer to Redmond’s Passport authentication system. And, on the instant messaging front, AIM squares up to MSN’s IM. AOL are not taking Microsoft lightly [washingtonpost.com] but, unlike Microsoft’s other rivals and Open Source enemies, they’ve adopted a strategy that is both non-confrontational [upside.com] and effective [washtech.com]. While the Open / Shared Source debate took a turn at O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention when Craig Mundie’s conciliatory speech [use.perl.org] took most by surprise and made the opposition look positively odious, Microsoft’s bid to foil AOL-TW’s plans [atnewyork.com] to buy into AT&T’s cable business - thereby preventing them delivering advanced applications via cable - signals a return to normalcy.
At the end of the day - and beneath the cloud of obfuscation afforded by the whole “integrity-PPC-engines-MS-Open / Shared Source” debate, AOL and the engines, like Gates Inc., are going about the business of business, i.e., maximizing profit, growing market share, and finding new ways to take our money.
Calls to ethical behavior will fall on deaf ears unless we follow them with consumer action, bigger ad campaigns, or better products. If this serves as our point of departure for debates on search engine ethics, most Net users appear happy with things as they stand :(.
UK politicians are generally lawyers or professional politicians...some of them are intelligent and decent human beings who do their best to do what they think is right
the actual problem is that they and journalists now inhabit an entirely imaginary world full of over-simplifications and complete travesties of reality...this is the world the media reports on, this is the world legislation is intended to effect...no wonder people are disaffected with politics, because politicians aren't actually interested in any of us except in how we are reflected in the fantasy world they share with newspapers and TV
to get some understanding of this process try CNN's Q&A chat room and compare the online discussion with what is filtered through to the studio...anything that doesn't fit with standard journalistic perceptions is filtered out...simple one line meaningless stuff gets through...reality and fact are completely let go in the face of the imperative to make it "compelling" television
and that's amongst the best journalism on TV
”UK politicians are generally lawyers or professional politicians...some of them are intelligent and decent human beings who do their best to do what they think is right” … “politicians aren't actually interested in any of us except in how we are reflected in the fantasy world they share with newspapers and TV”
Nuff said… :).
Thomas Frank’s piece (see above) illustrates this paradox beautifully – just as when AOL swallowed Time Warner, all remaining editorial substance was downsized or sucked out by the suits demanding swift returns on their investments. When “all the news that’s fit to print” is driven by the Bottom Line, the result is bound to be execrable or scatological, i.e. sh*t. Nevertheless, it is always acceptable to those suckered by the “mass appeal” ethos permeating our quick-fix society. We exhibit a hunger for racy sound bites that makes wired junkies-cum-coffin kiddies look like fat-walleted, silver-haired pensioners high on hazy nostalgia.
The trick is to hold your nose between two fingers and dig through the staid dung heaps left by CNN and their ilk. The Web sustains a wealth of well-written, incisive journalism written on the back of fast-breaking stories not yet picked up by the bottom-liners (diaper journalists). This is word-of-mouth news gathering is backed up by fast verification, pyrotechnic prose, incisive commentary, and considered opinion. And the great thing about it is that it is cast in HTML, not stone or concrete. It reflects mindsets rooted in values subject to change rather than stiff-necked bigotry shot through with poker-ass rigidity.
The blue-cotton shirts in the boardroom are aware of this stuff. Check out John Katz’s op-ed in the Boston Globe [boston.com] and Kevin Featherly’s piece in NewsBytes [newsbytes.com] (urls courtesy of JD’s blog [jd.manilasites.com]).
Look, like everything – including search engines and directories, all this is my opinion. There’s a lot of puke out there but, as sure as tomorrow’s Friday, the Web does give us a great deal of choice and great content. Who needs the papers? Find me a Webbie who’s read one :).
Reading between the lines is no longer a talent – it’s an absolute necessity.
