A couple of days ago Google announced that it would be creating a separate tab for blogs. A lot of people, not least Andrew Orlowski, who broke the story, seem to think that blogs are destroying the fabric of the internet. Much like the Sun saying that asylum seekers are tearing the UK apart, they're offensively wrong.
The following is the text of a message that I posted to the Webdesign-L mailing list on this subject:
So far the blog indexing conversation has focussed on the negative or subtractive aspects. I think there are many positive aspects to indexing blogs properly.
Blogs are updated at least weekly, often hourly, but their content only changes minimally. Identifying blogs will give Google the ability to derive algorithms that are much more suitable for the task, e.g. incrementally updating the index. They won't have to index every single post/comments page on a blog as often as the index page, so they can spend more time doing other stuff.
One of the key usefulness of blogs is that they pass stuff around very quickly. They don't always do this perfectly accurately however, and maybe Google can start looking at ways to filter 100,000 slightly wrong blog entries into one more accurate source. Perhaps choose the entry with the most correct facts (as judged by popularity) or something along those lines.
I also think that the effect on the main index if they do remove blogs will be minimal, even negative. Although many blogs are useless guff, many are also very useful link pages. If I've spent time solving a problem, I often write up my solution and include links to the pages that helped me out. Somebody looking to solve the same problem would benefit from the filtering work I've already done as humans are rarely worse than machines at assessing information.
I for one think that a separate blog tab is a very exciting idea and I'm interested to see what Google do with it.
As well as this I agree with points raised by other people that whilst 90% of blogs are shite, 90% of everything is shite. Blogs are as useful a type of content as news sites, review sites, product pages, reference pages and all the other menagerie of stuff you get on the web.
Note I'm not pompous enough to think that this blog is a vital part of the internet, I'm talking about blogs in general.
4:54, Monday May 12th, 2003 • feeling critical • no comments
Russian Ark is an amazing achievement. It is a tribute by director Alexander Sokurov to the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. The entire film is one single shot. It's a hundred minutes, which is the most they could fit on the biggest hard drive they could get to record to. The film features more than eight hundred actors. Perhaps most amazingly of all, they only actually had four hours in the museum to do the take. They apparently rehearsed for four months beforehand.
To watch, Russian Ark is dreamlike, the steady movement of the camera back and forth lulls and involves you. It follows a French Marquis and a ghost as they move around the salons of the museum. Constantly shifting in time and space, we glimpse a Russian upper class at it's most lavish and ornate as well as more modern figures. It is a beautiful act of choreography that also manages to communicate a lot of Russian history through the living record that is the Hermitage. The Hermitage, also called the Winter Palace, is sumptuous and gigantic, it's interiors were created by the Tsars and today house a vast repository of objects. In a hundred minutes the museum barely hints at having an end, indeed the spaces get progressively more vast and incredible. The final scene shows the progression of hundreds of people in sumptuous costume down a gigantic staircase and along a corridor that must half a mile long.
Louise and I planted some window boxes and put them on our lesser balcony. My Mum gave us some really nice terracotta pots and we bought plants, seeds and compost today. Being in the garden centre was a bit freaky, but I managed to not flip and run away. We have Lettuce, Rocket, Chives, Parsley, Mint, Basil, Lavender and some Cornflowers. The Chives, Parsley, Mint and Basil were bought as plants so we can eat those straight away, but we'll have to wait a month or so for the others to do their thing. Apparently Rocket just grows like a bastard. You pick it every couple of days and it just keeps coming back. Louise and I couldn't really grow too much salad, we both love eating it. We were also really tempted by bigger vegetables but we don't have the resources. If we manage to grow a steady supply of herbs that would be cool. I just have to get into the habit of cooking with them now.
14:15, Saturday May 10th, 2003 • feeling relaxed • no comments
This is the best kitchen ingredient I have ever bought. It has made every meal we make better. Go get some!
Louise and I visited my parents last week and watched my Dad cooking. He's a very keen foody. His particular style is fairly Mediterranean, i.e. he'll take a courgette or a pepper and make a fantastic meal by combining it very skillfully with various spices and seasonings. I love his food and I've starting trying to rip him off, hence the salt.
23:43, Wednesday May 7th, 2003 • feeling thoughtful • no comments
My Dad sold his company, the deal is done! I'm now the owner of a bunch of shares that are worth a fair amount of money. The only problem is I've already spent it. It equates very closely to the amount of debt I have, almost to the penny.
At the moment I'm torn between clearing out my student loan or instead using the money to travel. The student loan is the cheapest loan I'm likely to get so it doesn't make total sense to clear it. However, the amount of money I can gain by selling shares is limited by my liability to capital gains tax. I have an allowance of £7900 before I have to pay anything, but this covers my more pressing debts and leaves very little for travel. If I want to have a decent bit of travelling, I will have to either pay a bunch of tax or wait until April next year. Tax will be either 10 or 20%, I can't quite work out which. In addition, I probably won't have to declare the gain until this time next year, meaning I will be liable to pay the tax in 2005. God only knows what my financial situation will be then!
