explodedlibrary.info

Michael Gorman really doesn't understand anything about blogs

[This post was followed up here on March 7, 2005]

I’m not usually one for “me too” posts [see also librarian.net, Library Stuff and the Free Range Librarian on this], but ALA President-Elect Michael Gorman’s rant about bloggers is too provocative for me to hold back. The first thing is that his criticism is very hypocritical. He says this about bloggers, “Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts.”

He admits early on, “Until recently, I had not spent much time thinking about blogs or Blog People” but then after being criticized by some bloggers, “[he] rapidly learned more about the blog subcultures.”

Well, he obviously didn’t do enough research if he thinks blogs are all alike. He has no idea that that some blogs are scholarly and well-researched (certainly more so than his statements). It’s true many aren’t, and they don’t intend to be. He is also ignorant of the diversity of librarian bloggers – we have different political opinions, different views about the future of the profession and other topics. We will even disagree about him – whether he is a totally clueless embarrassment to librarians or whether he might have a point and that us bloggers shouldn’t be so thin-skinned.

My opinion obviously can’t be taken seriously because it hasn’t gone through the “publishing/editing process” which is Michael Gorman’s touchstone about whether something is worth reading or not. I’m also an Australian and I’m not a member of ALA (although I am a member of ALIA). That said, I am firmly in the “he is clueless” camp.

Yes, he has a right to his opinions about blogs. I just wished he had expressed them last year when people were voting on his suitability to be President Elect of the ALA.

He says that his “views on "blogs" have nothing to do with [his] activities as ALA president-elect or president.” This shows how he really doesn’t get it. He thinks blogs are crap (not his words, just my concise summary of his position), but tells us that this won’t influence his actions as ALA President. But the ALA as an organization should be making better use of feeds and related technologies, and should use any means to improve its relationship with its membership (and potential members). Blogs have a networking and activism potential which could be very helpful to the ALA if they harnessed it effectively. That will never happen under Michael Gorman because he thinks blogs are crap because they haven’t gone through the infallible publishing/editing process.

This is not the first time that Michael Gorman has suffered from foot in mouth disease during this month. I was appalled to read how he thinks fair use shouldn’t apply to a blogger who reproduced portions of the Tulsa World newspaper for purposes of criticism. The Tulsa World is even complaining about this blogger linking to their site. Does Michael Gorman also agree with this? Does he even know how links work and the function that they serve?

the iPod zombie trance

I am an iPod zombie too. This Times of London article points out some of the disadvantages of people wearing iPods – both on an individual level and on a group level.

I concede these. There are days when I’ve forgotten to bring it along or recharge the batteries, and I am amazed sometimes by how much interesting background noise there is to hear. Birds, leaves rustling, snatches of conversation on the footpath, bus or train.

On the other hand, sometimes there aren’t any interesting or appealing ambient sounds. Sometimes it’s just the white noise of traffic.

I definitely use the iPod more in Sydney than I ever did in Hobart. Why is it more of a big city thing? Is it peer pressure, being more reliant on public transport, the busier and more stressful lifestyle?

Listening to music is an escape from the drudgery of the world. After a long busy day in the office, and faced with a grueling commute – it is nice to simply tune out and almost be somewhere else.

Yes, I can see why it isn’t a good thing to have a society where everybody is enclosed in their own personal musical cocoon. On the other hand, this is also a reaction to other things going on in society. If the people who are soliciting donations for charities, selling credit cards or just begging are going to be more upfront about interrupting me – when this isn’t welcome – then I am grateful for anything which makes this more difficult. Acting as if I am in an iPod trance is one way of shielding myself from this.

It’s possible that iPods and other mp3 players are creating a world where people are unaccustomed to silence and where abundance of music is taken for granted as just a background.

It doesn’t have to be like this. It’s also possible that the option of having constant music will help us appreciate deliberate silence.

libraries and SEO, two different world views

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the exact opposite of what librarians are about. I don’t mean to draw a good vs. evil dichotomy here, but more of a yin & yang difference. People in SEO see the searcher as the object which exists to serve the subject, the websites of their paying clients. We see websites as the object, which exist to satisfy the information needs of the searcher, who is the subject.

Imagine if libraries were organized by SEO principles, so that we were paid by publishers to ensure that more people used particular books or databases. Instead of titles being arranged by Library of Congress or Dewey, it would be more like a supermarket, with the most valuable shelf real estate going to the most potentially lucrative products. Reference librarians would have to adapt as well. We would dump that tedious reference interview where we tried to ascertain what information a user was really wanting or needing. Instead we would work out which product in our paid-referral section was the most suitable for this person, and then steer them in that direction. If nothing in their question led them to any of these products, we would re-interpret their question, or even correct their question so that it did lead to the outcome that was beneficial to both the library and its publisher-client.

I’m tempted to think that SEO is just a sub-section of advertising, which itself is one area of marketing. Advertising and marketing are also double-edged swords. There are ethical issues associated with marketing harmful products such as tobacco or weapons. There are also ethical issues associated with particular advertising techniques, such as subliminal advertising and advertising to children. Sometimes you get the worst of both worlds, when improper techniques are used to promote harmful products, such as advertising cigarettes to children.

When I speak of double-edged swords and ethical pitfalls, I don’t mean to signal out SEO, advertising and marketing for special treatment. Other people, like librarians, lawyers, journalists, even your regular blogger have some problematic areas of their own, where special care needs to be taken. Also, some good can come from marketing. Marketers have taken some psychological findings and applied and extended them, so that now psychologists have an even better idea of how people think and act. As for advertising, in addition to funding free-to-air TV, radio and many internet services, some ads are so creative and amusing that they are works of art in themselves. Even your regular odious email spam has been recognized for some of its amusing characteristics [thanks Cat for showing that to me]. I’m yet to discover any positive things about comment spam on blogs, although maybe the flattery spam could put a smile on some people’s faces – for just a moment, until they realize what’s happening.

Ideally, there should be room for both the library model (connecting people with information) and the advertising/marketing/SEO model (connecting information with people). There seems to be demand for both approaches. We could do our thing and they could their thing and we could just agree to disagree about which approach was better.

Unfortunately, we tread on each other's toes in the arena of blogs. Blogs of libraries and librarians, and of course every other blog with any noticeable readership, are targeted by comment spammers. Not only is the comment spam annoying, time-consuming to deal with, and would smother all legitimate comments if left unchecked, but it is an unwelcome philosophical affront. When the comment spam leads to the worst extreme porn sites, it feels like a cruel violation.

Comment spam is just one area of SEO, and not all of SEO should be tarred with the abuses perpetrated by comment spammers. On the other hand, if people engaged in SEO want their field to have more respect and credibility, they should be more proactive about reigning in (or at least condemning) some of the unethical comment spam practices which happen under their umbrella. Some bloggers would be surprised to know that many comment spammers resent the very blogs and bloggers whom they target. Why would this be? Because of the interlinked nature of blogs, it is easy for a blogger without any effort – or even intention – to end up at the top of search engines results, undoing a lot of SEO work. Some comment spammers think, if these amateurs are going to muck up our work, we’re not going to feel bad about feeding off their work.

Besides, people in SEO argue, don’t blame us, blame the search engines and the blogging software producers who created the conditions for comment spam to flourish. I hope that the no follow tag will help undercut it, but as I mentioned in my previous post, let's not declare that comment spam is dead yet.

The position of the search engines is rather ambiguous. Although they each try to provide the best search experience for their users, they are all funded by advertising dollars, in some form or other. That is a potential conflict of interest, but it is so widepread that it is no longer remarkable. Maybe they would say that theirs is the middle path between the SEO model and library model, and that they have found the correct balance between the interests of users and advertisers. If that is so, the search engines should remember that the nature of a balance is that is very delicate and can very easily get out of kilter.

hoping that electronic discussion lists remain alive and kicking

[17/2/05: This document has been changed so that all references to "listserv" have been replaced with generic terms such as "electronic mailing list", "email lists" and "electronic discussion list." At the time that I wrote this post, I didn't know that LISTSERV(R) is a registered trademark owned by L-Soft]

I am the first to admit that electronic mailing lists can be very annoying sometimes. There are the inevitable out of office replies. There can be threads as well as people are who are just annoying, and the unsettling possibility that a flame war is waiting around the corner.

With these defects, as well as a few more which I’ll mention, why do I think that email lists still have a valuable place in today’s internet, dominated as it is by much cooler technologies, such as blogs, feeds and increasingly, tags [link to Salon article, viewable by subscribers or (free) day pass holders]?

Don’t even bother with the digested version – the magic of an email list is that approximates an actual conversation that is happening right now. Digests, although they might convey the information, don’t capture this magic. That’s why they are usually so boring and stale to read.

The purpose of digested email lists was to prevent the evil of your inbox being flooded when there's been a busy day (or technical problems), smothering all of your other more important emails. Fortunately, it is now a lot easier to train your email programs to put discussion list emails in a special folder, away from your regular inbox. Alternatively, if you use Google’s Gmail or something similar, the back and forth is automatically threaded under the parent email. This automatic threading cannot take into those instances when somebody decides to continue the conversation by starting a new thread, instead of just replying. But hopefully one of these methods will make it easier to manage being on a electronic discussion list so that it isn’t so annoying.

You may ask, why bother, doing all this work to reduce the annoyance – when it’s so easy to subscribe to blogs in an aggregator, a method which leaves totally in control of the people you’re reading.

And before I continue, I want to make it clear that it is not my purpose to denigrate blogs by saying a few tiny positive things about email lists. This isn’t a zero sum game and there is more than enough room for both types of discourse.

possibly luddite confessions

1. I’ve never bought or sold anything on eBay. On a couple of occasions, I have browsed eBay and have been amazed at the sort of things which can be found there. I hesitate for a few reasons, although now I think that most of my security concerns have been allayed. But all the same, I’m in no hurry to pick up another computer-related pastime.
2. I like to subscribe to the print version of my city’s daily newspaper. Yes, I also look at local newspapers online and even on my mobile phone, but I’ve learned that not everything is published in the electronic formats. There is a difference between reading online and reading in print. The good thing about reading the paper version is that you are not dependent upon headlines to decide whether or not you’ll read an article. It is a experience which is more open to serendipity, finding interesting things by chance and getting out of one’s ruts. When I subscribed to the Sydney Morning Herald, I never realized I was being entered into a competition – and I ended up winning a whole lot of furniture. Which was very welcome for me because I had to give away or sell cheaply all my American furniture, when I moved back to Australia, exactly one year ago today.
3. I prefer to use travel agents to book flights. I have travelled between Tasmania and Minnesota many times. For this complicated international flight, which would involve up to 3 different airlines and several legs, it was always much cheaper and easier to go through a travel agent than going directly to the airline or trying the travel sites. If it’s a simple trip and there’s a good special for booking on the web site, then I will take advantage of this, and now that I’m living in Sydney, I imagine that this will happen more often. But even so, I am very interested to see how travel agents cope in this new environment. Travel agents and librarians (and journalists too) are particularly affected by the disintermediation trends on the internet. I don’t say endangered, because it doesn’t have to be like that. I think that disintermediation has hit travel agents first and hardest, and I wonder if there are any lessons which librarians can learn from the experience of travel agents.

this blog has no follow tags - will it reduce or increase the comment spam?

I’ve been thinking a fair bit about comment spam lately. I haven't been particularly afflicted with it lately *touches wood* but  I've had some interesting comments in a recent post in this blog from somebody defending the practice of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) (a post about this is forthcoming). Then of course there's the news about adapting no follow tags to combat comment spam on blogs.

Because this blog is a TypePad blog, no follow tags have already been implemented. If you don’t believe me, look at some comments, view the source code and do a Find search on “nofollow.” Unlike MovableType bloggers, I haven’t needed to do a thing to implement this. What this means is that any URL that’s posted in a comment won’t get any PageRank benefit from Google – and equivalents with Yahoo and MSN Search, although I don't have any details concerning them. This means that you can link to sites that you hate and not worry that they’ll get any PageRank benefit from your link - not that I'm planning on taking advantage of this.