— Now that Mickey Kaus’ Kausfiles blog has moved to Slate, his traffic will go up and he’ll be linked by more sites, increasing his relevance in the Blogosphere from 247,000th (kausfiles.com’s Alexa ranking) to 2,845th (Slate’s Alexa ranking). This puts him ahead of the leading blogs, NRO (11,066), Arts & Letters Daily (18,337), Sullivan (49,465), Dave Winer (57,381), and Instapundit (68,172).
As the sixth-leading blog, Instapundit isn’t exactly the king maker he was when he was the second-leading linker last November, and people are starting to notice that an Instapundit link isn’t the avalanche of hits it used to be (in some cases it’s not even noticeable.) The blogosphere is now so large that nobody can manually index it every day, so visitors to Reynolds’ site read the summaries and rarely click-through, realizing that he’s just got the tip of the top of one of the flotilla of icebergs. More and more, we’re relying on automation to sift and filter and find the cool stories in the Blogosphere, which means more Daypop and Blogdex, and less Professor Reynolds, Dave Winer, and similar manual link-makers.
Steven Johnson speculates on the next evolution of the Blogosphere in a Salon article referencing old-school blogger Jason Kottke and others of the manual search bent, contrasting blogs with journalism:
But the debate is a false one. What makes blogs interesting is precisely the way in which they’re not journalism. Sure, if more writers can follow in Sullivan’s wake and turn their blogs into revenue-generating enterprises, blogs will certainly mark a qualitative change as far as the underlying economics go. (Effectively it will mean that bloggers have a new, usually modest revenue stream to supplement what they take home from their day jobs.) But the journalistic form itself won’t be all that earth-shattering, certainly no more revolutionary than the first-generation Web zines, which were often staffed like old-style print magazines, but sported hypertext, multimedia and genuine community interaction alongside those traditional mastheads.
More in this vein in Wired and at Nick Denton, who’s building a next-generation blog company. Johnson and Kottke are too hung-up on the details of how the existing web might transition to the Semantic Web, probably because they don’t have the background in textual analysis, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence to catch on to methods that are outside the scope of HTML, XML, SOAP, or any of today’s web-building techniques.
Here’s what’s going to happen: in a few months, you’ll be able to build a blog, or more precisely, a dynamic web site, with content largely selected for you by a search robot that understands what you like, who you like, and where the stuff you like is found. You’ll edit a selection of stories found and presented to you by your search robot, and you’ll comment if you please on the stuff you decide to include in your own Daily Dish.
The collective choices of you and others like you will be refined story-by-story, topic-by-topic, and day-by-day until a Best of the Web that reflects your own tastes and values, and those of people you trust, will be your guide to the Blogosphere. And when that happens, Reynolds, Steven Johnson, and the other beacons of the Blogosphere can get to doing the same thing that everybody else is doing, namely analyzing, opining, theorizing, and creating content (or thinking, as we used to say when I was a philosophy student,) instead of vainly trying to direct traffic. And it will be a better web, and a better blogosphere, and a better Noosphere than we have now:
“No one can deny that a network (a world network) of economic and psychic affiliations is being woven at ever increasing speed which envelops and constantly penetrates more deeply within each of us. With every day that passes it becomes a little more impossible for us to act or think otherwise than collectively.”
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)
(The Formation of the Noosphere, 1947)
The techniques and methods of this emerging web were all described in a theoretical way by Vannevar Bush, the first blogger, in his seminal 1945 article, As We May Think:
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client’s interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient’s reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.
That’s where we’re going; how we get there won’t matter to most people.
Update: See Jeff Jarvis, Reed Stott, Henry Copeland and Eric Olsen for reflections on this theme, courtesy of Matt Welch. Glenn unfortunately believes this post was about him, and not about the web, human knowledge and civilization, and technology. Sorry folks, but the Instapundit stuff was just the hook, not the story.
Well, I won’t be linking to Slate anytime soon if they don’t get rid of the annoying, text-covering ads that refuse to go away until you click a link. It’s one thing for sites to use that stupid car ads that zoom all over the screen, but at least those “commercial breaks” end after a minute (the ad goes off to its little corner) — it’s another thing to have a screen-obscuring ad that you can’t get rid of until you look at it. And it didn’t even offer a cool flash-type-game, like that Hewlett Packard ad banner from a few years back that was a Pong game.
You know who makes a mean jambalaya? Wolfgang Puck.
There. Now I’m officially irrelevant.
Try this:
http://angel.net/~nic/slate.cgi
At the beginning of this post numbers of given ranking blog relevance. What are these numbers from and how can I find them?
So how reliable are those Alexa rankings, anyway? When I feed in “www.instapundit.com,” I get one ranking. “www.instapundit.blogspot.com” generates another ranking. I suspect a true ranking would be some combo of the two, since either url will get you to Glenn’s site, just as http://www.iw3p.com/DailyPundit.dailypundit.php and http://www.dailypundit.com will get you to DailyPundit.
People aren’t merely going to sites like Instapundit or Kottke solely for the links. People are going there for the personality, and in the blog game, the most unique and interesting personalities will win in the end. The difference between Instapundit and Blogdex is the difference between watching Jay Leno crack jokes about current events and scrolling the AP newswire. Another thing, sure you might have an intelligence agent that will find the stories that reflect you interests, but the reason I frequent blogs is to experience other people’s perspectives. It is others cognative filters and perceptions one is consuming, not mere links.
Alexa rankings are crap. I can’t believe people take these rankings seriously.
See my analysis of Alexa rankings, Alexa Ratings Are Crap.
Doesn’t like HTML. Oh well.
Alexa Ratings Are Crap
http://brian.carnell.com/articles/2002/04/000054.html
The Alexa rankings aren’t perfect, because they only reflect the surfing of the people who happen to use Alexa, a group that’s probably heavily weighted toward “early adopters” who more or less dig high-tech for its own sake. That being said, the only figures that I would change in Alexa’s rankings of the top 6 blogs would be Winer and Reynolds. But NRO, Sullivan, et. al., probably are much more widely-read than Reynolds; people who’ve been linked by NRO and Reynolds say that NRO links are worth thousands of hits, and Reynolds links more like hundreds.
In the example he cites, Katie Granju, we find the first Instapundit link (4/28) brought her maybe 100 new visitors; the second (4/30) about 800, and the third (5/6) about 2000. The variation is about days of the week and content – a Saturday Insta generally doesn’t register. The first Granju cite was to the effect that kids are good, no big deal; the second said that kids should play with guns, which catches the attention of Glenn’s NRA crowd; and the third was about adults sleeping with children, which did indeed bring an avalanche of 2,000 hits. From this we can draw certain conclusions about Glenn’s audience, in case you hadn’t noticed the frequent and adoring references to hot young babes who blog on his site.
But the post wasn’t really about Glenn, folks, it was about the size of the Noosphere and the nature of navigation in an era where no one guy, no matter how cool he is, can cover it all. Why are you all missing the point so studiously?
The Alexa rankings are absolutely worthless. A site of mine that’s only two days old has a much, much higher ranking than another. The problem? I’m the only person to visit the new site, while Yahoo site statistics tell me that thousands have visited the older one. The problem? It tracks hoosierreview.com and not http://www.hoosierreview.com, where all of the links are aimed.
As for Bennett’s charge, here’s a good response: http://www.hoosierreview.com/2002_05_05_mediaarchive.html#76442274
So to clarify where you’re coming from Richard:
– the robot will collect stories based upon the preferences you provide.
– the bloggers will then provide commentary on the links generated.
But let me bring up an old problem; the problem of novelty. Part of the fun of going to sites such as Kottke and Reynolds (it’s funny how in mainstream blog articles Kottke have become shorthand for old-skool left-leaning bloggers and Glenn and Sullivan have become the shorthand for nu-skool right-leaning bloggers) is that they don’t have your preferences. There is enough of a shared worldview that you don’t feel like you’re on Mars but since they are unique personalities you are intoduced to novel links and connections. Of course you could create something to generate novel linkage, but I don’t know how. You might end up with some novel cake recipe instead of a weird link that knocks a new room in your reality.
“Of course you could create something to generate novel linkage, but I don’t know how.”
Yes, that’s exactly the point – you don’t know how., but others do, as you will see shortly.
The comments by the pseudonymous “Hillary Carter” at Hoosier Review have me lamenting the state of higher education in America, because the poor chick clearly can’t read. She thinks I’m taking a swipe at her favorite rock star, and is in such a hurry to spew emotions to the masses that she misses the import of this paragraph of my musing on the evolution of the web:
“The collective choices of you and others like you will be refined story-by-story, topic-by-topic, and day-by-day until a Best of the Web that reflects your own tastes and values, and those of people you trust, will be your guide to the Blogosphere. And when that happens, Reynolds, Steven Johnson, and the other beacons of the Blogosphere can get to doing the same thing that everybody else is doing, namely analyzing, opining, theorizing, and creating content (or thinking, as we used to say when I was a philosophy student,) instead of vainly trying to direct traffic. And it will be a better web, and a better blogosphere, and a better Noosphere than we have now”
Does that insult Glenn Reynolds? Does it say he’s obsolete?
Learn to read, groupies.
Richard I’ll take the high road here on the personal insults and show you where you’re wrong, and unfortunately don’t see it.
First you use the Alexa rankings, which are so unscientific in determining hits and visitors that a middle schooler could get a better estimate.
Second, you ask “Is Instapundit over?” You go on to state that his links aren’t as powerful – once again, lacking hard numbers. Through it all you fail to mention that his number of hits has been increasing, and in fact give the opposite impression.
REF INSTAPUNDIT.COM. I HAVE GLEN BOOKMARKED. I DON’T HAVE YOU BOOKMARKED. I CHECK GLEN’S SITE TWICE A DAY. I DON’T THINK INSTAPUNDIT IS OBSOLETE. IF HIS SITE IS OBSOLETE WHY DID YOU USE HIM AS A HOOK TO GET PEOPLE TO LINK HERE? AND NO, I DO NOT AGREE WITH GLEN ALL THE TIME. MAYBE ABOUT 60-70% AND I STRONGLY DISAGREE ABOUT SOME THINGS. BUT HE IS MOSTLY FAIR AND VERY INTERESTING. I’M A BLOG SURFER AND I DO NOT KNOW GLEN PERSONALLY BUT I THINK I DETECT SOUR GRAPES HERE. I WON’T BE COMING BACK TO YOUR SITE. THANKS FOR THE CHANCE TO RESPOND. DEL/BARTLETT, TN
Look, “Hillary”, whatever your real name is, your most recent missive further proves that you haven’t learned basic reading comprehension. Let me break it down for you in real simple terms:
1. Many people have observed that a link from Instapundit doesn’t generate the traffic that it used to. I’ve talked to them, and that’s how I came to know this.
2. Glenn (that’s the correct spelling, Del) does two things on his blog: opine and direct traffic.
3. In the future, Glenn will be able to spend more time opining and less time directing traffic, because technology will handle the traffic better.
4. We all like his opinions, and wish he would spend more time on that part of this blog and less on the linkmaking. That would be good, right?
Other people – like Matt Welch, for example – didn’t find this entry of mine too difficult to understand, but you’ve managed to completely miss the point, twice.
Are you majoring in Feminist Studies?
Either way, Hillary’s hot.
Richard sez,
“Yes, that’s exactly the point – you don’t know how., but others do, as you will see shortly.”
What are the others doing? What technologies are being developed?
See the “Update” in the original article for some of the links. The technical details aren’t public yet, but they generally involve various means of classifying, analyzing, and retrieving content and links to sources of content, around the web.
How many hits today? and how many come from Instapundit? I think you are a bit hypocrital, using Glenn Reynolds and whoring for hits.
If the only thing you can pick about my post is the mis-spelling of Glenn’s name then I’ll stand on my post. My impression is that you are an angry person. Goodbye. “poof”
i thought ‘DEL’ wasn’t coming back…they always do. i take yr point Richard,and while i’m not a big fan of Glenns site (tho he, himself, seems like a cool guy)i do think that the post here gave the impression of attacking the man, or, at best condescending, it’s just the tone i reckon. that being said, i find this whole posit/prophecy intruiguing. as for me, i just read all of y’all i can…and links from the ‘little’ guys mean much more to me anyway. sorry for the e.e. cummings, just trying to be the yan to DEL’S ying.
Yes, I would like for Glenn to spend more time writing opinions, rather than linking to stories or other opinions, but I also don’t want to put a computer program in charge of what news I read. I thought about developing a web based clipping service for awhile, one that would display content based on user preferences, but then I realized how problematic that could be.
By filtering the news to meet our preferences, we limit our view of the world, and our observations become skewed to meet our prejudices. We do that to some extent anyway when we chose which stories to read, and which to skim over in the daily newspaper, but think about this. How many times have you read a story in a newspaper about a subject which doesn’t normally interest you because the headline grabbed your eye, or some new circumstance made it more relevant than would normally be the case? If you had somebody preview the paper for you, and cut out all of the articles which did not fit in with a predefined set of preferences, you would never have seen those stories.
An automated filter would be much worse. Not only would you not know what you were missing, but eventually, you would not realize you were missing anything at all.
I’m not thinking filter so much as augmentor, kind of like Tivo “Suggestions” that would tend to broaden your scope, not limit it. But this whole idea of a web app is new, since I wasn’t thinking about doing one until Reynolds suggested it. I’ve never really thought of blogging as anything but a hobby, frankly.
Sounds lame. Tivo suggestions are crap, I trash 99% of the stuff my Tivo thinks I’m gonna like.
Besides it’s unnecessary. Instaman is our version of a Tivo suggestions thingie, his accuracy rate is a lot better.
Richard: As much as some folks seem to think that your post was only about Prof Reynolds, I’m interested in the guts of your argument, and its ultimate ramifications. Namely: what will a post-evolutionary blogosphere look like?
Will we see a plethora of LGF-like blogs that lean heavily on personal style, charm, or unique spin to sell themselves to readers? Or will we see a mere expansion or repetition of info, where new blogs become more and more derivative? Will the old blogs (someone emailed me calling mine an “old blog,” but I’ll have been blogging for only a year in July) adapt to the expanding universe, or collapse under deadweight and linkage one can easily find elsewhere?
What do you think?
Hey, anyone remember Third Eye? It was software that would allow users to comment on web pages (via a browser plugin). Seems like the sort of thing Steven Johnson is talking about in the Salon article.
I take your broader point, Richard, and I agree with you that link-aggregating would probably be better performed in software; to the extent that blogs are only link lists, they are insufferably dull (cf Slashdot).