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World wide wasteland

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Re: World wide wasteland

#51

Post by knowtheory »

What?

We're complaining about the disappearance of blog-rolls? Seriously?

I think this article fundamentally misunderstands what the purpose of blog rolls was, and what has filled those niches since.

Blog rolls used to basically fill two purposes, either 1) an exercise in co-branding (which folks still do: https://svbtle.com/ ), or 2) as a list of things that folks find interesting.

1) is kind of a boring subject, and people have sensibly realized that there's a lot more that goes into consistent branding than just providing some links.

2) Is the space where a lot of special built tools have popped up, whether it's pinboard or delicious, or twitter and tumblrs for link blogging. I would argue that this is a vastly preferable circumstance to having a blog roll.

So, OP writes that "link love" is important. Sure it is. But one of the problems with link love, especially blog roll style, is that maintaining a list of links can be a pain in the ass, especially when blogs start winking out of existence.

The lack of a blog roll doesn't mean that linking has gone the way of the dodo. We've just reorganized the net and the way linking takes place. "Wasteland" is a bit much frankly.

Oh. this is to pimp a product. Nevermind. probably best just to ignore this entire conversation :P

Re: World wide wasteland

#52

Post by ChristianMarks »

One well-known climate blogger, Prof. Judith Curry of Climate Etc., NEVER allows trackbacks. Reprehensible. This is the worst case of a self-involved academic who thinks nothing of exploiting the time, energy and hard work of others to enhance her reputation. (I refuse to link to her information sink of a site here.)

Re: World wide wasteland

#53

Post by duck »

Linkrot is a serious issue. Just looking back at the top stories from Hacker News in the past for my http://waybackletter.com project is depressing at times. I need to compute some real stats one of these days, but I would say about 20% of links are dead. That is just the popular articles (by votes), I imagine if you go down the long tail it just gets higher.

Re: World wide wasteland

#54

Post by philiphodgen »

@Swizec, too bad your message was negated by the video pimping Zemanta at the end. Outbound links to cool stuff generated by a machine? That's exactly what you were mourning.

Love cannot be automated. Certain battery-operated appliances have been invented to attempt this (I've heard), but they can't replicate the real thing.

Links to good stuff cannot be automated. Selecting good stuff to link to requires good taste and judgment. Humans exercise good taste and judgment. This is the source of the value you miss from enthusiastically, freely given recommendations: "Hey, look here! This is really cool!"

A human did it.

A recommendation machine like Zemanta's is attempting to do the same thing that link farms, bent SEO, etc. want to do. Zemanta's come-on is a bit more appealing, perhaps. But its goal is the same. Listen to the message in the video.

The fact that love does not scale is liberating. I do not need a million followers. Or 50. All I need is to sit and talk to my friend Roger over a cup of coffee. Or help my 8th grader gently towards understanding the mis-magic of PHP. Or say "I'm sorry" to my wife when I screw up.

Or throw a great link on my website when it makes me happy.

TL;DR

Love doesn't scale. That's why it is so valuable.

Only humans love. Machines cannot.

Be human-sized. And give love.

Re: World wide wasteland

#55

Post by jwhite »

lmm wrote: post #2

You know, I always hated the echo-chamber many blogs became, blogging endlessly about what other people had blogged and not giving any thought to producing original content. I mostly steered clear of twitter, because my impression is it's even worse there. And I don't think I've ever in my life followed a "related stories" link. In the days of print we managed just fine without pointers to other works. If you were ve…

Link to homepage is a nice convenience to people who land on your site somewhere other than the homepage (e.g. via a search result).

Re: World wide wasteland

#56

Post by lazyjones »

patmcguire wrote: post #9

Google has a hand in this, too. PageRank and derivative algorithms stop making sense when the primary driver of traffic and therefore links is the algorithms themselves. Small differences get wildly exaggerated because whatever shows up first gets all the links, so there if you're a purely cynical actor the best route seems to be to try to write something as it's trendy and pray for a linkstorm miracle.

Exactly, one might think that Google is trying to monopolize links by punishing sites with outgoing links.

Re: World wide wasteland

#57

Post by JulianMorrison »

Yes tumblr does too count, n-levels deep screen spanning reblogs are common in the parts I frequent. Perhaps you need to hang out in the less cat-picture focused parts of tumblr, it's a very "small world" type system.

Re: World wide wasteland

#59

Post by progrock »

vog wrote: post #7
brudgers wrote: post #3

The problem with the utopian vision of the linked web is that links to meaningful content elsewhere on the web die. In November of 1994, I created a personal web page. I linked the one image (the logo of the university where I intended to go to go to grad school). By March, the link was broken. The school had redone its website. The world wide web broke the social contract implicit in Gopher. Geocities is no longer o…

This reminds me of the words of Tim Berners-Lee: Cool URIs don't change! http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html

And at the same time info hoarding for the sake of it is pretty awful too. How do you wade through the vast amount of dirge that is out there in the sea of bits? How do you avoid feedback loops that occur from search engine lookups? How can I actually find a bit of useful information these days? I'm sure it used to be faster than it is now... At least we used to have website circles, that would filter some of the wheat from the chaff.

Re: World wide wasteland

#60

Post by progrock »

lmm wrote: post #30
davedx wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe, and maybe we need a better discovery solution. But I don't think peppering our actual content with pointers away from it is the solution. How can a discovery solution not provide pointers to the thing you're discovering?

The discovery solution needs to have the pointers. But the actual content doesn't. I'm advocating keeping discovery on dedicated discovery sites (which would of course be full of links), rather than mixing it in amongst the content.

More value in inbound links than outbound links?

The environment sets the context of the content. But your content may appear different when viewed from a different aspect (under a different context.)

A piece of content barely stands on it's own, that's the charm of the web. It's an endless task trying to atomise it.

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