The State of Online Writing

When I started writing online in the late 90's, it was about the opportunity to say something. To express myself to a wider audience than my local newspaper, I've done the "letter to the editor" thing many times and while it was nice to see something I had written in print, it just didn't give me the satisfaction I get from an exchange of ideas in a forum or at a public gathering of concerned friends and neighbors.

So when the Internet thing came along, I thought this would be an ideal medium for reaching a much wider audience than what I could in my little circle of friends or the city newspaper. And for the most part, this has been true. If I hadn't changed my publishing system, you would be able to find a few hundred comments to articles I have written which are well thought out and reasoned. I have enjoyed the opportunity to respond in the comment sections and this has been real satisfying for me. Then about a year or so ago, the detritus of the Internet decided to start polluting the sites of decent, hard working people by posting garbage to the comment sections of their online weblogs or blogs (depending on which term you like to use). These were often advertisements or links to gambling, prescription drug, or pornographic sites. While on a little read site this doesn't seem like a big thing, let's remember there is a role played by search engines in this story.

Search engines are applications which follow links from one page to another. When they reach a page they index all of the content (words) on the page and then with some voodoo math and obscure equations come up with a scoring mechanism for returning links to the pages they have indexed as search results when you go looking for information on the marvelous world wide web. So let's say you are having a problem with little Johnny eating his peas. You go to Google, or Yahoo and search for "children eating vegetables". Along with the usual commercial sites with lots of targeted advertising you find a few sites run by pediatricians (kid doctors) and decide to click the link to their solution to your problem (Johnny eating peas), the article is right on and interesting, at the bottom you find there are comments by other parents with information providing feedback to the author about what worked, what didn't, a few thank-you's and such. While reading the articles you run into a few comments loaded with 10 or so links to Texas poker, golden casino, viagra 4 less, and many other unsavory links. This is not what you wanted, and is certainly not what the kid doctor wants on their site. But guess what, I said their was a role search engines play here, the more links from unaffiliated sites which point to another site, raises the score of the linked to site in the mathematical wizardry of the search engine. This means, if I can get my "Drugs for Less" site into the comment sections of a few thousand non-pharmaceutical sites, then my ranking gets closer and closer to number 1 when someone searches for something that is related to my site. Therefore as a publisher of content which allows the leaving of comments or trackbacks, it becomes a major task to keep the comments and trackbacks cleaned of the unwanted "free" advertising for unsavory sites.

I decided to jump out of that game. Some mornings I would be greeted by more than 200 unwanted comments which had no relation to anything I had written. I installed plugins, upgrades and even changed backend systems. While the fixes worked for a little while, the unsavory characters always found a new trick to get their filth onto my pages. I was so disgusted with this blatant unscrupulous behavior I even contemplated removing myself from the Internet entirely. And for a while I did. But the urge to write returned with a vengeance, not to stand in the way of this urge, I have returned to the world of online publishing, but no longer accept comments, trackbacks or feedback from others. Of course, one could drop me a personal e-mail and if I were to find it worthy, I would post it at the bottom of the appropriate article. And then again, I have provided a link on every page to my simple, yet elegant online forum. I do invite comments, I just don't invite them easily.

Which brings me to the second major issue I have with content producers, that being the one of advertising. Many weblogs, blogs, what have you, are now sporting the Google Adsense advertisements. While some have put them in a tasteful position in a sidebar or at the bottom of a page, many are putting them into the middle of pages and in places guaranteed to be the most disruptive to reading. Others are just posting snippets from news sites with links to those news sites. Not really saying anything or providing any benefit to the seeker of knowledge or entertainment, they are just trying to be magnets for search engines and are trying any manipulative trick they can devise to get their search engine (SE) rankings near the top of the heap, in an effort to have their advertisements displayed and generate revenue (the long green) for themselves. About.com is a good example of this, while they do have good content, the pop-up ads, banner ads, and javscript sliding ads just drive me crazy! I no longer follow any links from search engines to an about.com site.

If you've read down this far, here's my advertisement! No! Just joking, I will never have any advertising on my site! I've stopped accepting comments and trackbacks in an effort to prevent others from using my resources to promote their whatever's, if my simple yet elegant forum starts getting abused, I'll kill it also. If you wish to comment on anything I've written about or alluded too, feel free to send me an e-mail. I do have excellent SPAM protection and I do know how to use the "delete" key!

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