Look Ma, I run a blog …

After a not-so-short conversation with Vel, I started wondering about the blogging phenomenon that has swept the cyberworld in complete awe just like current Google stock prices have. The term blogging really caught up with the masses after the 2004 US Presidential election that for the first time featured a faultering conventional media. Blogs run by republican and democratic supporters did a very fine job of bringing “real news” to the world.

One has to wonder; is this phenomenon just a fad? How long is this fad going to last? Is it really going to change how we assimilate information? I don’t view blogs as anything more than a website that is easy to update fairly regularly and is much more interactive than a static website in the sense that it allows for some level of reverse interactivity. A blog is just a website, after all. Throw in a few tools like trackback pings and RSS Feeds, and you have a ring of information.

Is this a fad? A short answer is yes. There are millions of blogs out there. Everyone has a blog. How many of these are actually useful? Very few. I think we’re facing some sort of information overdose at present. The problem lies in actually assimilating all the information out there. This is why search is so hot these days. Then there is this whole issue of trust. A blog is a piece of personal opinion. Unlike traditional media outlets, blogs can not be monitored for factual accuracy. Search engines, especially Google&reg, are designed to assign more weightage to negative information when it comes to ranking pages. Clearly, this is a computer science issue here.

I think we need to learn something from E-Commerce technologies when designing the next generation news and information aggregators. Autonomous trust is a keyword in E-Commerce, and this needs to be adopted in dynamic information search algorithms. So, if you have a network of trustworthy blogs giving a certain repertoire of events, they should be deemed credible. Simply assigning priorities to blogs based on traditional link-based page ranking is not a good idea for blogs.

This fad is here to stay, although we will see shifts in how we actually log our thoughts on the Internet. Podcasting is hot now. Something new will enter the scene later. The bottomline is that the pervasion of the Internet has made all of us information producers in the virtual world. It is our responsibility as citizens of the free cyberworld to make this information flow as trustworthy and reliable as possible.