On Blogs

I've been following this Terri Schiavo thing recently (ugh, what a mess) and a few things abotu the nature of information and blogging have occurred to me. Number one, most websites these days are ranked by popularity (number of page hits). Google is a good example of this. But other ranking systmes are based on the number of links a given page gets form other pages (like www.blogdex.net). In any case, I've noticed that many of the blogs that pop up on my radar are talking about Terri Schiavo, just like the talking heads on teh TeeVee. I honestly think that most of the country doesn't give a hoot about Terri Schiavo, or the current Steroid Abuse hearigns or any of the other inane shit going on in the mainstream media right now. So why do the blogs have to parrot the subjects the TeeVee wants to cover? I thought the internet was supposed to be more free-thinking than that?


Many "blogs" out there fancy themselves as their own media broadcasters. Usually, they suck. In most cases, they just comment on something the real mainstream media has put out there though. This sucks. I also tend to notice that the worst, most provocative information tends to come from blogs that do not have a mechanism for collecting comments and reader feedback, Again, I thought the internet was supposed tobe more free-thinking than that. Ultimately, these kinds of sites get much better google and blogdex rankings because people get so pissed off with them that they have to link to the offending blog posting in some other blog or bbs that allows for comments and reader feedback, so they can express some kind of counter-argument. The problem with this is that no one ever reads the counter-arguments, because they don't get ranked well in most webpage indices. All a guy like me usually sees is the pooorly thought-out posting meant primarily to piss people off.



I have a proposal for a remedy:



1) Do not link to webpages that do not allow reader comments.



That is all.