For those of you who haven’t seen the data, be sure to comb through David Sifry’s latest “State of the Blogosphere” report. Unlike the political counterparts to its namesake, he actually publishes zeitgeist-like trends a couple times each year and always unearths interesting factoids (such as the title of this post).
One nugget in particular that rings home to me is his mentioning of “splogs” or spam blogs. I hate them. I wish providers of “free blog service” would somehow rework their system to remove these from their databases and [temporarily] ban the creators IP address (similar to Wikipedia abusers). I know they have tried extra super-duper hard since Mark Cuban’s outcry months ago, but what do you say when almost 90% of the sites that link to your piece are automated bots adding no original content — just using you for a pagerank? Comment spam is also frustrating, but is more manageable from my end allowing bloggers to kill the devil before it spreads (i.e. I filter out what I want commented on and WordPress, among others, has an easy-to-use function for this capacity).
The only thing Sifry touts that I really don’t buy into the “tagging” system. I like it in theory, but I see it as too broad and too easily abused — just as meta-html-description-tags of yore. Adding the tag “Google,” “Microsoft” or “Apple” to a post does very little in telling potential readers what your story is about. Why? Because there is so much involving these companies, from lawsuits to innovations, that one word conveys little. I think it is perhaps the most overhyped feature of “Web 2.0” (aside from the very concept of “Web 2.0″ itself). For to-the-point people like myself, it does not help me locate the pithy thesis quickly or succinctly.
Anyone want to buy the domain pund.it from me?