[- blogs and google, tails wag dogs?
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By amy, Section question corner Posted on Sun Jul 6th, 2003 at 10:29:11 PM EURODISCORDIA TIME
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Soon, it'll be easier than ever to post to discordia! ;-)
The new version of Google Toolbar is going to have a feature that lets you automatically post to your blog about a website you are visiting. But does that mean the giant Google tail wags the web dog again?
[Editors note: One of the nice things about blogs is that tangents can develop that are more interesting than the original story. This is one of those cases, so please check out the comments for a discussion of cross-cultural political disputes inadvertently spawned by Google. -amy ]
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I and others have raised some public concerns in the past about the incestuous nature of Google's PageRank Technology. Sometimes it's been manipulated intentionally. Other times, it just creates a clique of "important" websites (read, big sites whose owners also own lots of other domains, and/or have important friends.) So those kinds tend to get higher Google ratings than independent sites, dissenters' sites, etc. Which isn't surprising, except it gets kind of annoying when Google starts bragging about "the uniquely democratic nature of the web."
Why does this matter? Because Google has become the ultimate mega-medium and propaganda tool, the replacement in many ways for mass-media, often becoming more important as a meta-medium than the content it links to. Otherwise, why would even governments be interested in censoring information in Google?
So, what does this have to do with blog posting? Well, lately, blogs have been subverting Google's "old boys network" pagerank system, sometimes bringing independent content to the top of the rankings. It so happens that blogs like to link to one another's stories, and so often blogs form a de facto network of "importance" to Google's rankings on a topic... (so one or more blogs rise to the top of the rankings on that topic.) Now, if Google itself becomes part of the process, I immediately start to get suspicious... the majority of sites in Google are still corporate... are Google thinking that people will start blogging more high-google-ranked sites, and thus reinforce Google's "relevant" search results instead of bucking them? Or is it possible for this to really be a "neutral" software tool? (I don't believe in those of course :-) ) ... But then, why such a generous and selfless gift from Google? There must be more I haven't thought of...
PS.. the preceding story has 3 links from major corporate sites and 1 link from an indy site. :-)(
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