If this is the Digg phenomenon, I don’t want it
I 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:
“This just in. The president’s dog has run away. Here’s Jim with more details.”
“Yes, thank you. It appears that the president’s dog has really run away. Or it might have been a cat. Sally at the White House has more details.”
“Here’s Sally. I’m near the White House and it appears that someone here heard that the president’s dog has run away. Pete is talking to someone who saw it. Let’s hand over to Pete.”
“Thank you Sally. I’m talking to Robert who says he heard someone say that someone saw the dog run way. Robert, maybe you can tell us….”.
And so on. Ad infinitum. Ad nauseam.
(Incidentally, if you just found yourself thinking ‘Hey, real news stations *do* work that way’, I can tell you which country you live in).
If you’re going to be reblogging something and re-re-blogging and then posting your summary to some social bookmarking site — can’t you at least make sure that a) you add something worthwhile to the issue, and b) you include a link to the real source of information, and not just hearsay? If you don’t provide at least this little service for your readers, you don’t deserve them. This is not dissemination of information — it’s Computer Herpes. Or Blogorrhea. And you’re not making it better by spreading it around.
Oh — and since I’m a very impatient person (I think I mentioned that already, didn’t I?), I didn’t even bother to follow the whole trail of breadcrumbs to the very source. So I can’t actually tell you how many more levels of moronic indirection there would have been. And I can’t even remember what the posting was about, either.
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