Tyler Cowen on bloggers:
I have never once met a person whose blog I like and then been disappointed. Never.
I wonder if the converse is true as well. Would you like a person if you don’t like their blog?
Scott Rosenberg takes a look at Mark Penn’s crazy numbers in his article on professional blogging.
Needless to say, his assertion that 2 million Americans are being paid for writing online don’t hold up.
Jason Kottke makes some interesting points about quoting and attribution and blogs that you should read. I’d quote the good parts, but when you read the post, you’ll see why I didn’t.
Be sure to read Andy Baio’s post on AllThingsD’s content appropriation for background.
I was very sad to read that Doris Dungey, a.k.a. Tanta, one of the two bloggers at Calculated Risk, has passed away. She represented everything that’s good about blogging. Erudite, witty, and incredibly informative, she did a great job of making the complexities of the mortgage market understandable to outsiders like myself. Nobody who followed her work over the past two years has been terribly surprised by the great unraveling we’re seeing unfold.
My thoughts go out to her friends and family.
Today Barack Obama nominated economist Peter Orszag his to head the Office of Management and Budget. Orszag is currently director of the Congressional Budget Office and writes an official blog in that capacity. Not quite the same as publishing a personal blog, but interesting nonetheless. I wonder if he’ll be blogging from the OMB as well? Marc Ambinder notes that OMB is in charge of implementing Obama’s transparency agenda. Putting that office in the hands of someone who’s comfortable blogging is a good sign.
Tim O’Reilly’s warning against a Web where sites link mostly to their own content is worth paying attention to. He makes two suggestions to sites that link to their own content, but his second rule says it all for me:
Ensure that the pages you create at those destinations are truly more valuable to your readers than any other external link you might provide.
To shorten that even more, your links should point to the best resource in that context, whether it’s on your site or somebody else’s. As long as you’re following that rule, I think you’re on solid ground.
My previous post on the Boing Boing controversy generated some pushback from readers who argue that deleting posts is changing history, and that bloggers just shouldn’t do it. (As I mentioned in the comments, I have never gone back and deleted old posts and don’t foresee doing so.)
I agree completely with the idea that deleting old content breaks the web and can be seen as an attempt to change history. It’s Orwellian to go back and alter or delete content when your opinion changes. If a newspaper went back and removed all of the stories in favor of the war in Iraq, it would lose any standing it might have as a respectable media outlet. And I feel the same way about blogs. Deleting old content is in all likelihood an act of dishonesty.
However, the way search engines work these days makes things a bit more complicated. Google’s great innovation in indexing Web sites was to use inbound links to sites as a metric for the significance of a Web site. The more sites link to your site, the higher your rank in search engine results, and being linked to by more popular sites is more helpful.
Google’s algorithm doesn’t care whether I link to a racist Web site to denounce it or ridicule it. It treats that link as it would any other link to that Web site — a vote for its significance. This strikes me as a fundamental problem without a really good solution. If I linked to one of my favorite blogs many times, and and later its domain expired and was purchased by a site that promotes bigotry, what should I do? Leaving the links in place lends the credibility of my site to that site in the eyes of the search engines, even though the content has changed completely. A human reader following a link would clearly understand from context that something had changed about the link destination, but the indexers probably would not.
In this day and age an outbound link to another site has a real cash value, and given that, I’m not sure what the correct behavior is for a Web site that links to others. I wouldn’t give $5 a month to a cause I fundamentally disagree with, should I provide that value or more to a Web site I don’t agree with by leaving links in place that don’t lead to the same content that they once did? It strikes me as a real ethical conundrum.
Perhaps the right answer is to excise the links from the old posts and to add a note explaining why the links were removed. Then the content is not fundamentally altered, and the behavior of the blogger is fully explained. That seems like a better compromise than just deleting entire posts.
Here’s Xeni Jardin on why they unpublished some old posts after a disagreement with the person who was the subject of those posts:
This is a directory of wonderful things. If we no longer think something is wonderful, we have every right to remove it from this directory.
I’m not sure what I think of that. It’s clearly trivially true. They could take the whole site down tomorrow if they wanted to. But is it ethical to selectively remove posts as they have?
I can certainly think of cases where I’d say yes. Without mentioning names, there was once a blogger who posted mainly about Web design, PHP development, and so forth. After a certain news making event, the focus of his blog changed to criticizing members of a certain religious group (and ethnicity), and he attracted a vociferous community of readers who post even more bigoted things in the comments. Had I written any posts praising this person before the subject of their blog changed, I would have unpublished them, and I would not apologize for doing so.
I have no idea what happened in this particular case, but I don’t think there’s any kind of absolutist argument against BoingBoing’s decision to unpublish.
I’m thinking of trying a new experiment. Since I don’t have an anonymous blog, it’s rather difficult for me to post stories about what I work on, people at work, and other related topics. Once, a coworker posted at length about a conversation we’d had, and I found it slightly strange. I wouldn’t want someone I work with to learn what I thought of them through a blog post when I haven’t made those feelings clear to them in person.
I’ve been thinking about composing posts and then just sitting on them until some sort of internally imposed statute of limitations runs out. Any ideas on how long that should be?
Here’s something bloggers should probably be paying attention to. Rogers Cadenhead’s site The Drudge Retort ran afoul of the Associated Press by using headlines and excerpts of its stories and was rewarded with a DMCA takedown notice.
In the process of responding to the AP’s demands, Rogers was put in touch with Robert Cox of the Media Bloggers Association, who volunteered to mediate on his behalf in the dispute based on prior experience working with the AP on something else. Until this week, I had never heard of the MBA, and apparently neither had Roger, who posts his own explanation of how Cox came to be involved in his dispute with the AP.
Cox’ involvement has prompted a pretty strong backlash, for what appear to be two reasons. The first is that media coverage of the controversy has portrayed him as being a spokesman for bloggers in general, which he in no way is, and the second is that some of the other things are, to put it mildly, controversial. Teresa Nielsen Hayden has an exhaustive post on Robert Cox and his background that’s worth at least skimming to get an idea of why his involvement irritates people. Scott Rosenberg posts in defense of Cox.
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