Poking the blogosphere

I feel like an early adopter that's late to a party for the first time. Dang! Well I'm here, so I may as well pontificate. Or at least point out some good sites that explain what in the world is going on in the the blogosphere.

The Truth Laid Bear is all about tracking blog traffic. The ecosystem ranks assorted blogs based on the number of sites that link back to that blog. It's sort of a way to rank relevance, popularity and relative impact on the blogosphere. Point. Click. Type. is a lowly insignificant microbe. May the Nifamatic evolve into a higher being and global influence in short order. (Tangent: Did anybody read Ender's Game? Valentine and Peter took over the world at ages 8 and 10 using blogs to peddle political influence. The top blogs in the TLB ecosytem are far left and far right political pundit sites. That Orson Scott Card is one prescient Mormon.)

So yeah, Google's search algorithm uses a sort of similar page ranking to return relevant search results. (That's probably why Google bought Blogger a while back--to have a world of blogspots in house to inform and optimize their linking algorithms.) Anywho, an interesting characteristic of the blogosphere is redundancy. The number of times a meme is repeated (i.e. a site is quoted and linked to) the higher that meme bubbles up in the collective conciousness. And the harder it is to excise an idea from the public sphere. Censorship becomes an impossibility. Of course only a certain set of ideas ever make it to the cool blue screen, given limited access the means of production. But, my favorite open publishing site Wikipedia has a cool response to this. They're looking for people to edit pages on topics like Women's Studies and oh say, the entire continent of Africa.

Get on it people. If you're reading this, you're already way outside the mainstream. Get to moving your memes from margin to center. (Note: the preceding link goes to a woefully thin wiki on bell hooks. But notice the "edit" link in the corner. It's a great opportunity for one of you feminist professor types to Point. Click. and Type.)

Woohoo!!