Jason at Webomatica (who has the most elegant blog design ever) asks: Does Web 2.0 Negatively Affect Content? He tells the story of a newspaper that tracked hits on its web site to drive their print newspaper content. The result is content driven by the prurient forces of the Internet.
The most read, or at least most arrived at, page on my blog is my review of Natsuo Kirino's book "Out". The Google search strings to find this are invariably "she strangles him." I get 3 to 12 of these a day. (The book involves a woman strangling a man).
That newspaper would have me believe that the world greatly supports women strangling men. Andrea Dworkin aside, I'm not sure there's a huge movement for this.
The problems with judging sentiment by search strings or the attraction of users to a given link are legion and obvious.
They include:
- Search strings are not in context
- Page views do not equate to long term interest
- Random visitations reflect 1 and 2.
Jason says:
I must mention that there’s a downside to tracking clicks, which show the more impulsive side of users. Stories might be better ranked by a public rating system, even one step further would be public comments as necessary to register a “yeah” vote. The public admission is key: many would publicly suggest coverage of the latest productivity numbers, while “secretly” clicking on underwear model stories. Nothing wrong with that, but maybe perhaps websites should track the best aspects of their users to determine content directions.
He also links this to recent issues involving gaming on Digg. I tried to use Digg, I really did, but in the end it seemed so chaotic and whimsical, that I'd never find reliable information there. Despite the issues that people have had with Techmeme, I've preferred to use that as my rapid filter and my network at the secondary filter.
Web 2.0 doesn't negatively affect content, necessarily. But Web 2.0 is a tool that is easily abused. Social software is barely out of the womb and is very easily gamed. Again, this doesn't make it useless. It just means you have to be a smart user.
A newspaper that allows itself to become a tabloid because of Internet clicks is not a smart user.
Anyone who only gets their news from autogenerated sources is likely also not a smart user.
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Image somewhat borrowed from Carter Comics, so give them a visit and read some things.
I'm at Another Freaking Starbucks using Windows Live Writer.
I'm guilty as charged of using feedback from traffic to my blog to help me decide what to write, but perhaps not in the way you think.
One of the things I look for is not the most popular terms, but interesting search queries hidden down there among the least popular terms. Often these are hits as a juxtaposition of two posts which combined contain all the keywords but don't really answer the implied query. If I'm alert or need inspiration I'll write a new post to answer those. This season it was people looking for sample election ballots in cities and townships where I had posted links to Halloween trick or treat hours.
Another source of inspiration I've had is looking for the frequently selected links out from my blog, where any kind of unusual traffic is often a sign that something I have written about is in the news and there's a reason to go hunting for more current details. Recently I've gotten more than the normal traffic on my Katrina Cottages outbound links so it was time to see what was up.
I don't even try to pretend to follow TechMeme - that part of the blogosphere is too inward looking and all consuming to match my interests. The more fun part of the chase is to find the newspaper article that locates the newsletter post that tracks down the obscure but essential email list where the 50 people who are defining the field of interest are having a conversation.
Posted by: Edward | 12 November 2006 at 00:22