If this is the Digg phenomenon, I don’t want it
Monday, September 25th, 2006I don’t know whether I’ve mentioned this before in my blog, but I am a very impatient person.
Just this morning I found a link on the Digg homepage that sounded quite interesting. The link sent me to a person’s blog entry which gave me a brief summary of the information (from which, in fact, the Digg summary was copy/pasted — OK, this dude added his blog entry to Digg). This blog entry contained a link to another person’s blog. Which told me more or less the same thing the previous blog posting did, along with the link that “Joe has more info on this” — you guessed it: Sending me on to yet another blog.
Now some reblogging and referencing is fine. It’s what the Web and Hypertext are all about. But sending people on a hunt through a chain of four or more blog postings, one referencing the other, hunting for that elusive snippet of information? No thank you! This is not “social bookmarking” or “collaborative filtering” or whatnot. This is three guys sharing a brain. Parrots.
Someone, somewhere, caused this problem by writing a “how to drive traffic to your blog” posting containing the following pearl of wisdom: “If you find something interesting in someone’s blog, add a blog posting about it on your blog, leave a trackback link and link to it from your blog.” What a f****ng idiot! Never mind the poor readers who might actually be interested in the information you’re referencing and now are having to follow this thread of links across multiple levels and layers of comments and indirections. After all — hey! More eyeballs for everybody’s Google ads.
Imagine if news programs worked like this:
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