We Are The Search Engine

Continuing to discuss Link Blogs (here and here) we need to consider their evolution. More specifically why they evolved at all.

Newspapers and magazines have an editor (or several) that decides what the audience would like to read. They publish articles intended to suit their target audience. Advertisers pay to reach that target audience. Simple enough; well covered territory.

The web was different. On the web, anyone could publish anything but there was no way to find it; at least not initially. Search engines languished for a while with manually compiled lists (Yahoo) and crude keyword crawlers (Excite). Then two bright young kids came up with the idea that “a link from page A to page B (is) a vote, by page A, for page B” and what has now become Google PageRank came to rule search. Google takes it further by upvoting links from more important pages as heavier in voting weight than those from less important pages. It seemed difficult to crack this at the time, but it’s been done and is common knowledge now.

The one problem with search is that you have to know what you want to search for before you begin. There’s no “Browse” feature unlike a magazine or newspaper stand. How do I know what I want to read on the web before I want to read it?

Enter the Link Blog. People of different tastes around the world are now acting as their own editors; curating the web for content they find interesting. By following these Link Blogs of like-minded people we have a way to browse the internet without having to search. By checking multiple TwinkBlogs we can echo those articles others have found interesting and seeing the same article reblogged by multiple TwinkBloggers entices us to read that article more so.

This process fundamentally matches Googles PageRank system with a twist; we can tweak the algorithm by following whomever we choose. Without realising it we have now become the search engine ourselves: only you can browse this one, and read what you please too.

TwinkBlogs

As previously discussed here the phenomenon of Link Blogs is playing a major role in shaping our tech news digesting habits: For better or for worse. Most blogs are put together with increasingly powerful Content Management Systems (CMSs) including Drupal, Movable Type and WordPress. The traditional method of hosting a web site requires readers to visit the page directly or obtain an RSS feed of that site to see what’s happening. How best to spread the word about the site though?

Enter Twitter. With 140 characters it’s possible to link to an article and with followers on Twitter many will click through to read those articles. It evolves further with URL shortening services like bit.ly and eventually Twitter adds their own such that more of the precious 140 characters are available for commentary. With many bloggers writing shorter and shorter pieces, rather than bother with a CMS to direct traffic and pageviews to and to avoid site maintenance and hosting headaches, why not just Twitter Link Blog?

TwinkBlogs are the next step in iterative, bite-sized blogging, aggregating content for you, the follower. The currency of TwinkBlogs is no longer about page views but about follower count. There is no direct monetization for the TwinkBlogger however popularity can have a halo effect on ones career that whilst not calculable, may someday be of benefit in certain circles.

Why Too Many Link Blogs Are Bad For You

The Internet has fractured the traditional magazine and newspaper industries where once the editors would decide what the mass market readership would want, now people turn to the internet to seek the niches that interest them. Why risk buying a magazine with dozens of uninteresting articles and a mere handful that may get read, when scouring the internet for sites that interest you directly are plentiful.

Enter the Link Blog aggregator. These sites seldom produce their own original content. They offer brief opinions (some more well thought out than others) and are brief commentaries or at best poor percolations of other sites content: mainstream or otherwise. Rather than invest time in writing their own original content, pageviews are just as forthcoming from brief commentary and a link to the original site, and like it or not, pageviews are the only currency that matters on the internet.

Why have Link Blogs become so popular? There is no denying that John Gruber of Daring Fireball popularised the idea as equally as there is no denying he has built an impressive mini-empire based upon it. Where there is success for some, others will copy and there are many clones on the internet today. More interesting is the question of why he succeeded in the first place.

Access to websites and the internet when away from a desktop PC was not easily accomplished for the average user until the advent of the iPhone. With time on their hands when out and about people were then able to scratch the itch: “I wonder what’s happening with the Weather?” (Look at the sky maybe? Nope just check the smartphone). That leads to “I’ll just check to see if there’s any news,” Facebook, Twitter and yes, Link Blogs. Reading a link blog is a low-committment activity, no different than checking the weather. Of course one can not truly decide whether the long-form piece that was linked to was very good, but the link blogged summary makes up the minds of many who read it. Many don’t even click through to read the source.

This leads to a state of laziness where people are perpetually skimming through brief synopses of articles that don’t get the chance to be read and fully comprehended; then judged unfairly all too regularly. People become lazy with reading, with analysis, with thinking. The expression TLDR has become more common of late (Too Long; Didn’t Read) as if to suggest that longer articles are bad: could someone please provide a synopsis and a brief quip and put it on a link blog for me? [Thanks]

The effect is similar to the erosion of good diets. Many years ago sweets and chocolate bars were an occasional indulgence and one had to travel to a sweets shop to get them. Now with every supermarket carrying them and vending machines on most corners of our shopping centres, campuses and CBDs, temptation is everywhere and rather than stopping to have a proper meal people will snack on the sweets instead.

It is not my place to dictate what other people eat no more than I would tell people what to read, but just as you are what you eat, so to you are what you read.

Long form pieces should form part of the staple of every tech geek, lest their diet becomes riddled with “snack-like” link blog posts. If we succumb to link blogs and rely on them to aggregate for us, to summarise for us, to “think” for us, we will slide down a slippery slope towards lost comprehension. Link blogs may be skimmed in an instant, but many just waste our time. If you must read them choose carefully and digest in moderation lest your mind may atrophy.

We Love You So Long As You’re Not As Popular As Us

Google redirected its Android operating system after the iPhone was announced to look and feel more like iOS (the iPhone operating system) with Apps in grids and too many other things to list here. They did it to ensure that Google was able to get a foot in the door of the increasingly important mobile computing market.

Their strategy was simple: make it open enough that major OEMs would simply take a copy and run with it rather that roll their own operating system, but not make it too open such that devices had to support Google services in order to have naming rights for their device. OEMs would iterate and support the physical hardware and all Google needed to do to make money was to channel search queries, location information and contact details through their own ecosystem which could then drive their advertising business.

As many OEMs took up Android initially there was a massive surge of Android devices in the mobile market and quickly the devices outnumbered those by competitors. There were two popular strategies: skin it, or fork it. Skinning (Samsung, HTC) puts a polish on top of the user interface without changing too much of the usability. Usually it includes some customised Apps but it can be updated without too much effort to work with the latest Android release from Google, with all of the benefits therein. Forking (Amazon) is far more drastic and in these cases any hope of keeping the operating system up to date with Googles latest release is set aside and no integration with Google services is typically included. With either strategy, OEMs still wanted to make their devices their own, not just a “Google device” and this means that customisation is critically important.

Recently Facebook Home (a different kind of skin) made an appearance on Android. I’ve written previously about the wisdom/usefulness of it as a concept. It demonstrates a direction now being taken by the OEMs is to gradually insert more and more of their own services ahead of Googles on their Android device. Google says it is impressed and happy with Facebook Home as it demonstrates the openness of Android. Facebook Home is the next salvo from a company that represents a combined userbase that exceeds Androids install base across all manufacturers. If Facebook Home proves to be successful and it starts inserting  more layers between Googles services and its own, Google faces a further devaluation of Android on a scale beyond that which Samsung has already achieved with their Galaxy series smartphones.

Google surely can not be happy faced with a future where OEMs and corporations take away “Googles” mobile data using the very operating system they “gave away”. Google’s cry is “We Love OEMs Using Android” but in reality it is: “We Love OEMs So Long As You’re Not As Popular As Us”

Android has allowed OEMs to get products out into the market quickly with Google bearing the brunt of the operating system development burden. As each OEM gathers in strength, the task of adding more and more services and pulling away Googles advantage becomes increasing straightforward. With Facebook now aggressively entering the war for mobile, Google must be concerned if and how they can turn the tide back in their favour. In several years time there will be more fragmentation, with the number of users using Google services on mobile trending downward, and Facebook or maybe even Twitter skinning their existing install base and dwindling Androids value to Google. Apple will be sitting behind its “walled garden” with iOS, still pulling in big profits without having to sell itself to OEMs to get the revenue they enjoy, and Google may well be sitting back looking at its creation, and wondering where it all went wrong.

All The News “Is” Fit To Aggregate

Todays bombings in Boston have shown a growing trend in news reporting in the past five years. Previously large news corporations would need a reporter on the ground, talking to witnesses face to face, or perhaps over the phone to lend credibility to their news and make themselves the “must watch” or “must read” news outlet. This could involve helicopters and satellite link-ups and dozens of people all working together to report the news as quickly as possible and getting the best footage in order to draw the biggest audience. The bigger the audience, the more advertisers would pay, the better their bottom line. At least that WAS the model.

Much of this still happens however in the past five years social media has taken off and portable cameras and video recording devices (smartphones) have become ubiquitous amongst the general populace. Scarcely does an event occur where someone is not recording it because their friends or family are involved. Add to that the ability to share these photos, videos, messages and tweets on the internet quickly, plus the ability for anyone, anywhere in the world to search for those messages quickly and you have millions of reporters all over the world at the source of the news at the exact moment when it breaks. No sending a reporter, a chopper or setting up a satellite link needed any more. Joe Armchair can sit back in a shack in middle of nowhere (provided he has a good internet connection) and can link to or republish (with or without attribution) with very little effort, a web page with all of that information from a crisis in one place. Many people are drawn to the speed the news aggregators put news together and some leave old media behind.

That’s great but the underlying issue is credibility. News organisations have an aura of credibility (yes, many still do) when it comes to mainstream reporting. Journalistic principles and editorial ensure there are some checks and balances as news is reported. In some cases there is a long history of good reporting in that organisation that reinforces that perception. Perception is crucial.

Bloggers aren’t journalists. Reporting for a tech blog doesn’t make you a journalist. A journalist has studied journalism and reports on it as part of their life and job. Bloggers sometimes report on things, usually with large doses of opinion thrown in, this does not make them journalists either. Each has its place and that’s fine. Another hit to credibility: the bloggers are seldom (if ever) physically on the ground when the news breaks. That would require flying, driving or walking, rather than just searching the internet and reposting content to a web page from an armchair.

The speed of blogging may seem hard to beat but it’s not all over for the big news outlets. They are catching up as they learn to scour the internet (as aggregators do) for up to the moment news but they are still slower than blogs/aggregator websites. So the sequence of events seems to be: read the blogs first, then wait until the “real” reporting from news corporations comes in shortly thereafter. Provided big news outlets can stay afloat financially they will continue to close the gap and I hope they do. If bloggers and aggregators have pushed big news outlets along to be quicker at reporting news then that’s great, so long as they don’t break in the process.

It’s easy for people to become opinionated bloggers that aggregate content without analysis or relevance and sit back claiming they are journalists by doing so. News; Real News, doesn’t just need to be timely but needs to be credible and that credibility is something that bloggers simply can not earn by aggregating other peoples tweets.