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March 5, 2004
Show Us Your Fishing Hole
For some reason, a Slashdot editor bemoaning blogger "plagiarizing" strikes me as a hair goofy. Slashdot isn't a blog according to most of the current crop of self-appointed blog experts, but it's not a wild act of generosity to include it in the same branch of the web publishing family tree. One thing it definitely has in common with the "link blog" leaf of that branch is its almost completely derivative nature. It has a few reader-contributed reviews, yes, but not much in the way of reportage even though its editors frequently use the phrase "we reported on this earlier" to mean "we once linked to a story about this same subject." It's fair to say that the real creative spark on that site is the software that drives it, and perhaps the efforts of trolls to disrupt it. Beside the point.
The article he was citing is at WIRED, and it discusses how a team at HP, analyzing the flow of information and links around the blogging world, discovered that there's good reason to believe about 70 percent of bloggers fail to mention where they found a link. One manifestation of this seems to be more prominent blogs cherrypicking interesting links from their lesser-known confreres without citing them as the source.
At the risk of making Ed gnaw his tongue in half with anguish, this issue reminds me of a distinction Eric Raymond made during his "papers" phase between hacker culture and warez-d00d culture: Hackers (in the good sense of the word) tend to share source and methodology, crackers don't. It's a question, I guess, of different kinds of payoff. A skilled programmer writing open source code receives approbation for both his skill and his generosity, while a skilled cracker prefers his payoff in a lump sum comprised entirely of acknowledgement that his skillz are the maddest. The warez dude will eventually undermine his aura of elite competency if he acknowledges outside help or helps others figure out how to do what he does.
It's not hard to imagine that these two personality types have homes in other areas of endeavor, even if it's something as trivial as aggregating links. Some people prefer to teach you how to fish, others prefer to sell you a box of fishsticks. Sadly, the latter are acting like the Web is a small pond with a limited supply of fish they need to hold some sort of monopoly on. That makes their attempt to throw up a "Fishstix for Free or an Amazon Tip" booth look pretty laughable when we pan out and realize it's bobbing in the middle of a near-bottomless sea teeming with fish.
One thing I've consistently admired about Doc Searls is his near-compulsive transparency in terms of where he gets his links from. He always seems to toss in a "via" qualifier of some sort, which makes him a connector as opposed to a terminal end. BoingBoing is similarly generous and has source attribution wired into its design. These two sites are much better go-to reads for just this reason: Perhaps 25% of their links are of real interest, but they provide a way to sharpen my reading list by tracking down their sources, who might provide a slightly sweeter ratio of interesting/non-interesting stuff.
From my perspective, if a generalist blogger wants my return traffic, it'll happen when his/her blog shows itself to be a nexus as opposed to a dead end. There's nothing magical about finding a good link. The value add is helping me find more like it.
Comments
Ah, it makes me sad that you have to justify your use of the word "hacker" like that. Alas, you do.
Interestingly, I ran across your post via a linkdump from Phil Ringnalda, who was kinda snarky about the whole thing, I thought. He also makes the near-obligatory crack at Slashdot, which interests me. It's become immensely fashionable, almost reflex, to denigrate Slashdot as having an entirely too-high sn ratio. To an extent this is true though the worst parts are easily modifiable via filters. But Slashdot, with all its bad jokes and d00d bullshit, is really the kind of "emergent democracy" that the BlogMafia likes to posit itself as. Free speech, which some of us see as an absolute no matter what, includes the speech of people who call you a jerk. What I find interesting is a supposedly open culture, as you called it in my comments, acting more and more like a gated community. It's all starting to sound very "sivilized" - people are talking about authenticating comments, no more anonymous cowards, why should I credit the via chain, etc etc..
I been there before.
Maybe the best thing is to be on the fringe right now, if you're more interested in truth than getting Joi Ito to link to you.
Posted by: jbm at March 6, 2004 6:32 AM
But Slashdot, with all its bad jokes and d00d bullshit, is really the kind of "emergent democracy" that the BlogMafia likes to posit itself as. Free speech, which some of us see as an absolute no matter what, includes the speech of people who call you a jerk.
Slashdot's kind of a walled democracy, though. Where did kuro5hin come from? Largely dissatisfaction with Taco et al's control of the story queue in Slashdot. I never much gave a damn whether they ran links I contributed (until it became a professional issue), but it became a major issue for a lot of readers. The slashdot editorial response to those demands wasn't very flexible. One might even describe it as jealous. Hey... their sandbox. Taco and Hemos worked hard to build that site up, they've poured some real creative genius into portions of it, and the fact that they've occasionally surrounded themselves with some real jackasses for junior editors is forgivable considering the circles they're drawn to.
k5 made sense at the time, because no one had gotten around to canning a quality dynamic site and because hosting for the masses wasn't so practical yet. Someone who did have the wherewithal did the hard work and created a slightly more democratic environment. It was an appropriately democratic response: Rather than spending all their time nagging for more control of the submission queue, they went off and did their own thing. But even k5 is unsatisfactory when compared to the ability to maintain a personal site with adequate tools to facilitate interaction/discussion.
In the end, it seems that blogs and syndication have made Slashdot seem much less leading edge than it once was. I know I usually get stuff faster from the much more granular "blogosphere" as represented by a big, fat RSS list than I do from Slashdot. When I do visit Slashdot, it's with karma weighting turned on to drag down the "funny" comments below my +3 threshold and penalize "insightful" by a point just because that seems to mean "conformant with The Collective's understanding" in a way that's unsavory even if I can't quite describe why.
What I find interesting is a supposedly open culture, as you called it in my comments, acting more and more like a gated community. It's all starting to sound very "sivilized" - people are talking about authenticating comments, no more anonymous cowards, why should I credit the via chain, etc etc.
Just to clarify/reiterate, I own both "supposedly" and "open" in "supposedly open culture." Not just "open." :-)
I guess, as with Slashdot comments, people do some disappointing shit with their freedom in any context.
Posted by: mph at March 6, 2004 4:47 PM
"From my perspective, if a generalist blogger wants my return traffic, it'll happen when his/her blog shows itself to be a nexus as opposed to a dead end. There's nothing magical about finding a good link. The value add is helping me find more like it."
Doesn't this mean that you're stuck in a feedback loop of never actually seeking an endpoint to the clicking that has intrinsic value of its own? Something worth reading, rather than just clicking through? If all you pursue is the nexus (nexii?), then how are you going to get to the plexus and sexus, by gum?
Posted by: stavrosthewonderchicken at March 8, 2004 12:57 AM
Presumably, since I am a human, and not a robot with limited space for programming, I'll be stopping to enjoy some of the material these aggregators help me find.
But concern about saving me from a Flying Dutchman-like state of forever navigating the seas of the blogosphere in search of a home is certainly the most novel rationale I've come across for avoiding attribution.
Posted by: mph at March 8, 2004 8:50 AM