Untitled

Wednesday February 4th 2004 11:31 AM PST

Ok, go read this article. Its just a fuckin incredible rant about blogs and moveable type. I love reading stuff like this because somebody really took the time to write it, and must have been pissed off the entire time. In all probability the person is sitting around right now still pissed off.

Here's my response.

Section 1 - You are all pretentious twats
The human race has always been filled with pretentious twats, even before the invention of the internet and Moveable Type.

Section 2 - You make up irritating jargon for the sake of it
The human race has made irritating jargon since the creation of language. We didn't need the internet or Moveable Type to achieve this goal

Section 3 - All of your blogs talk about the same crap
Well DUH. There are only a certain number of things that people really enjoy to talk about. Go figure if you give a couple people a platform to talk, they'll end up talking about a small number of subjects. Again, didn't need the internet or MT.

Section 4 - Movable Type is badly designed
This is a basic principle of evolution. Something poorly designed, will either be improved, or will fail and fall into extinction. MT is being improved, but again, the principle of evolution was around before the internet and MT.

Section 5 - Movable Type's bad design makes it easier to DoS you
(see number 4) and also see the updates for MT. Also realize the concept of DOS was around before the internet or MT. People have flooded the White House with mail on a few occasions in history. People recently have taken the idea to the postal service again and have ordered countless numbers of catalogs and magazines to a person's address. So... sorry, didn't need the internet or MT to contribute to the DOS.

Section 6 - You are fucking stupid.
Yes, i know, but i didn't need the internet or MT to be this way.

Section 7 - You are all sheep
(see section 6)

Section 8 - Your blog is fucking up Google.
NOW WE HAVE SOMETHING!!! This is the only piece of relevant discussion in this entire article. The mass of blogs has had a major effect on the capability of search engines to find what people are really looking for.

The article fails to offer any kind of solution. But then what did we really expect.

END RESPONSE

We need to adapt both search engines and blogs to work together. I have on a few occasions actually gotten responses from people thanking me for information that i included in my blog. So there IS a reason you would want to be able to search blogs. At the same time there is a point at which all the blogs of the world get in the way of finding what you're really looking for.

I think the solution is a simple combination of meta tags and headers. Bloggers need to adopt a set of identification tags that will tell the search engines very quickly that they are indexing a blog. The tags might also include geographic location or other relative information about the blog. Then the search engines can offer blog-free searches as well as blog-specific searches.

But I'm sure as hell not the first person with this idea. The real trick is to implement the solution and get people to adopt it.

Comments:

Good response. I didn't even bother reading his rant. Just read the titles and figured it was a mindless bashing.

Posted by: Jason D-

I was under the impression that Google is working on a separate search section just for blogs (just how they have one for newsgroups), but maybe I'm wrong. Either way, it is a search engine's job to conform to the internet if it wants to be effective, not the other way around. Google will adjust, I have no doubt of that. The guy does have a good point about the vulnerabilities of MT, but you can use stuff like the blacklist and throttle control patches and stuff like that to prevent most of that (and MT is always coming out with new versions, of course). I think the guy is mainly just upset about how worthless most blogs are (mine included), but basically if he doesn't like them, he shouldn't read them.

Posted by: Yams